BC MANUAL

Bridgewater College Online Writing Manual

Topic Sentences

The topic of your paper is its overall subject.  Within the "body" of your paper--the middle section where you give your reasons and evidence for your thesis--each paragraph should focus on one smaller subject or topic. You can make the thread of your paper's reasoning easier for a reader to follow by providing a topic sentence in each paragraph.

If the thesis statement is a statement of your entire paper's point "in a nutshell," each topic sentence is a statement of a paragraph's point "in a nutshell."  If you reduced that whole argument to a single statement, the statement would be your topic sentences.

Although many published texts do not consistently exhibit topic sentences, most academic readers expect to find a clear, single statement of your topic at some point in each paragraph. Typically, topic sentences come at the beginning of the paragraph, sometimes at the end, usually not in the middle.

By A. L. Trupe, Sept. 2003