How to Write Captivating Topic Sentences and Organize Your Paper in the Process

How to Write Captivating Topic Sentences and Organize Your Paper in the Process

by Brandon Brown Introduction Are you looking for a powerful way to improve your writing, a single easy adjustment that can add clarity to your argument and an overall sense of organization to your papers?

Writing has a lot of different elements, but one that controls a vast amount of others is the topic sentence. The very process of constructing good topic sentences forces us to think, with a razor-sharp focus, about exactly what unifies the points we want to make in a paragraph and how that squares with the rest of the paper. To have a clear topic sentence heading the tops of our paragraphs is to demonstrate we understand the unifying theme of the points we make in those paragraphs, shows that we have a clear understanding of both our small points and our subject as a whole. Given its position in a paragraph—typically within the first few sentences —the mere location of the topic sentence causes it to stand out to our readers more than other sentences. As organizing as it is clarifying, a good topic sentence is a great way to take our writing to the next level. #1: Imitate to Elevate One of the easiest and effective ways to writing clear and engaging topic sentences is to imitate the writers who have written great topic sentences. To copy the writing style of writers who have perfected the craft is to expand—not only our understanding of writing—but also our skillset. Imitation does not mean we copy a writer’s words and ideas, adopting them as our own. Imitation means we try to uncover how they presented those words and ideas, the moves the writer made behind the text in scripting it.

Many famous writers have argued that we should imitate other writers. Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard professor, Stephen Pinker, believes that the way to learn how to write comes by observing the writings of others. “Writers acquire their technique,” says Pinker, “by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.” i Other writers have expressed similar sentiment.

What Pinker referred to as “reverse-engineering” journalist and writing professor Roy Peter Clark calls “X-Ray” reading. “This special vision,” writes Clark, “allows” great writers “to see beneath the surface of the text.”ii Let us look beneath the surface of The Shallows. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2010, The Shallows author Nicholas Carr begins his deep and technical investigation on the mind and the internet with a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain.

‘Dave, my mind is going,’ HAL says, forlornly. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it.’

I can feel it too. Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone or something has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.iii The partial quote above is from the first two paragraphs in the first chapter. Using a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Carr highlights the astronaut Dave Bowman manipulating and disconnecting the artificial brain of the supercomputer HAL. What makes this opening so powerful is that Carr uses the scene as an illustration to connect it with his own personal experience with the internet. What matters here is not about the use of contractions or whether we should quote movies in academic papers but the underlying move Carr made to connect the illustration to himself, creating a great transitional topic sentence in the process.

How did he do it?

Carr transitioned from 2001 to himself effectively and with power and style by ending the last paragraph with a quote from HAL, “I can feel it,” and by beginning the next paragraph using the exact same words, “I can feel it too.” The word “too” is key to connecting HAL’s 2

torment with his own. Repeating the same words also helps transition into the next paragraph, creating a topic sentence, where, sure enough, the paragraph is about how Carr feels the internet is altering his mind.

How can we imitate Carr’s topic sentence?

We could reproduce the style in a number of ways. But, to give a specific example, by using Matthew and fulfillment as the subject, we could use the writings of someone who opposes conservative scholarship and believes that the gospel-writer Matthew’s connection of Old Testament texts to the life of Jesus is both irresponsible and misapplied. Here is an example: Some scholars believe that Matthew may have misinterpreted Hosea altogether. Robert Miller, in his 2015 book Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy, claims that Matthew misused Hosea’s words in chapter 11, taking the minor prophet completely out of context.

‘Historical-critical exegesis,’ argues Miller, can see that ‘Matthew’s interpretation of Hosea’ is ‘a distortion of Hosea’s meaning.’iv Maybe the distortion is actually an illusion.

Though this imitation of Carr’s style does not achieve all that Carr does in his, like using an illustration to connect it to me or even to Matthew, but it does pick up the transitional nature of going from one idea to another and create a topic sentence in the process.

Here is one more example of how to use the move behind the text: “Ezra’s joy seemed to come before the end, praising Daniel for obtaining God’s hidden knowledge: ‘And you alone were worthy to learn this secret of the Most High’ (v 36-37).

Daniel was not the only one who learned this secret. Scribes, priests, and Jewish sectarians had all found their beliefs in a coming king by looking at the writings of other prophets and authors of Scripture” (my emphasis added).

By ending with a quote and taking a key word or two from the previous paragraph, we get a similar effect. #2: Use a Process that Helps You Think about Your Topic Sentences We could spend a long time looking at different authors and their styles. For the sake of space, here is one process that has helped me write topic sentences:

3

Though we could certainly think of topic sentences after we have written the paper, such a process would lead to a less organized paper. This process helps us do it beforehand, helping us to think through our arguments and write more clearly before we ever start actually typing words on the screen. The process is essentially this: think about the thesis of the paper, list out the points that support that thesis, order these points in the most logical order, and then transform the points from dull, bland statements into clear and clever sentences that introduce the paragraph. This process is like making an outline, but on the paragraph level.

We can keep using Matthew and prophecy as an example. The thesis of our paper is “Matthew’s focus on presenting Jesus as the fulfillment of Scripture combined with his fascination of retelling the story of Israel led him to claim that Jesus fulfilled historical narratives about Israel, texts like Hosea 11:1.”

One of the main arguments for our thesis, an entire section for the paper, focuses on Matthew’s understanding of fulfillment. To get to the topic sentence, we have to first list out the points we want to make and then order them into the most logical order. The reason for ordering the points first and not simply listing them out is to help us see the flow of ideas and then write specific kinds of topic sentences, like a transitional topic sentence. Here’s the list of points and their order: • Jews in the Second Temple period waited for a political messiah.

The Messiah had to come from the line of David.

Ezra is an example that the Messiah must come from David.

“The teacher of righteousness” in the Qumran community had believed in two messiahs.

•

•

The Messiah had to fulfill the Scriptures.

•

Matthew believed Jesus was the Messiah.

The theme of fulfillment is everywhere in Matthew’s Gospel.

Matthew talks about fulfillment in different ways.

Matthew 5:17 gives a great example that he thought of fulfillment as central to Jesus’ ministry.

4

After ordering these points to flow best and outlining the entire section, we need to rewrite each point to clearly, and stylishly, present the point of the paragraph. A topic sentence should be specific enough to go only with that paragraph but general enough to cover everything within it. Like the sentence itself—with its small, medium, and long ones—we should vary not only the length of the topic sentences but the style as well.

Here are a few examples of how we can transform our points for the section, the section on Matthew and fulfillment, into a topic sentence: As it is, the point from the outline that “Ezra is an example of Second Temple Jews believing the Messiah had to come from David’s lineage” could actually work as a simple declarative topic sentence, and would be a clear sentence, but such a statement is what we could find in many papers and can become repetitive because its words—“an example”—and its structure—which is as straightforward but plain as it can be—are the kind of sentences we use again and again in our papers.

To make the same point but say it in a different way, we could write the topic sentence like this: To wait on the Messiah was to look for a child to come from what Ezra had called “the posterity of David” (4 Ezra 12:32).

This sentence would feel fresh to our readers, first because of the word usage and the way the point is presented. The word “to” often does not begin a sentence, and the way it is expressed “To wait on the Messiah was to look . . .” has a flowing feel to it. We are also demonstrating that Ezra is an example of this point without explicitly having to write the generic phrase, “is an example.” The point is clear and is expressed uniquely. Once we have sentences written clearly and uniquely, the beginning of every paragraph becomes a treat for the reader.

We could rewrite the point that “Matthew believed Jesus was the Messiah” like this: While the Jewish people waited for the appearance of a political leader, a one-time Galilean tax collector named Matthew was writing about a rabbi from Nazareth.

5

This sentence, at once, summarizes the previous point and then compares this point with Matthew, who thinks differently about his understanding of the Messiah. The power of the sentence lie in the comparison. By comparing this powerful political ruler with a humble “rabbi from Nazareth,” it also compares humanities fallen expectations of the Messiah with what God was actually doing in the world. Omitting Jesus’ name and introducing him as “a rabbi from Nazareth” plays on the Christian understanding of Jesus. Because we know this statement refers to Jesus, this sentence, at once, helps to demonstrate Jesus’ glory because it highlights his humility as one of many Jewish teachers and one from Nazareth, but the statement also assumes that our audience knows he is much more, particularly the king of Israel and of the world. The statement is much more refreshing and fun to read than the stale, used over and over again, sentences we often put at the top of our paragraphs.

“Matthew used the word ‘fulfillment’ in different ways throughout his Gospel” could become this: As Matthew’s Gospel Extends, his Use of the Word “Fulfillment” Expands.

The power of this topic sentence lies in its brevity and simplicity. It says what it needs to say about the paragraph—no more and certainly not less. The point from the outline has been transformed from a generic expression into a more unique and fresh way of stating a point. The rhythm and pace of the first clause matches that of the second and has similar sounding consonant words—“consonance,” to use the technical term—placed strategically at the end of each clause. To avoid being predictable, to keep our writing style engaging, we would not want to write every topic sentence like this one, but instead vary them, utilizing different ways to introduce a paragraph.

So now you know how to elevate your writing with the power of the topic sentence.

By using imitation and adopting a writing process, you can write the topic sentences that will have your readers going from one paragraph to the next!

6

iENDNOTES Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (Penguin Publishing Group, 2015), 12. iiRoy Peter Clark, The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing (Little, Brown and Company, 2017), 3. iiiNicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 6. ivRobert J. Miller, Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy (Eugene, Or: Cascade Books, 2015), 346.