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The topic sentence tells the reader what your paragraph is about and the main idea of that paragraph. The topic sentence should usually be the first sentence of your paragraph. It might actually take two sentences to introduce a topic and map out where you are going in a paragraph. It depends on the length of the paragraph and the ideas you are working through.
You will need to make claims and introduce evidence in many of your paragraphs because you are writing a persuasive essay. One common way to do that is to use short quotations. Start by introducing the source and reason for the quotation in a phrase or sentence. Readers should be able to follow your meaning easily and to understand the relevance of the quotation immediately.
Remember that for each quote you choose, you should focus your reader's attention on the aspect most important to the topic sentence in that paragraph. Because readers need to know that you are moving from your words or ideas to an outside source, introduce quoted material with a signal phrase. A signal phrase is a word or group of words that introduces paraphrased or quoted material and informs readers of the source.
EXAMPLE
As Henry David Thoreau asserts in Walden, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (5).Notice the signal phrase in this example, which appears before the quotation.
EXAMPLE
“Walden sets forth one individual’s antidote against the ‘lives of quiet desperation’ led by the working class in mid-nineteenth-century America” (Thoreau 5).In this example, the paper focuses on the published work itself, so the author introduces a quotation with the work’s title rather than the author’s name, and the reference is still clear.
EXAMPLE
“Mary Catherine Bateson, daughter of renown anthropologist Margaret Mead, has become, in her own right, a student of modern civilization.”In this example, the author or the source is not well-known, so the quotation is introduced with a brief explanation which gives readers enough context to understand the quotation.
Keep in mind that a signal phrase can also tell the reader what the words in the quotation are doing. Are they explaining or defending? Are they noting or considering? They also move the reader from your words to the words of a quotation smoothly. The signal phrase provides a clear signal that a quote is coming, followed by the quotation. Take a look at some suggestions for signal words:
| acknowledges | denies | points out |
| admits | emphasizes | proves |
| agrees | endorses | refutes |
| argues | follows up | reports |
| asserts | grants | reveals |
| believes | illustrates | says |
| claims | implies | shows |
| comments | insists | states |
| concedes | maintains | suggests |
| concludes | notes | thinks |
| declares | observes | writes |
Remember that your evidence must specifically support your claim. This means you will need to plan for where you are going to put your evidence. In what order will it appear convincing? One strategy for planning out the evidence you will use is to start copying and pasting parts of your annotations into your outline for your paper. You will need to include the bibliographic information here as well, as part of your in-text citation.
An in-text citation is a brief reference within the text of your essay or assignment that indicates the source of information or ideas you have used. It requires less bibliographic information than a reference page entry. According to APA guidelines, in-text citations must include the following bibliographic data:
EXAMPLE
“Walden sets forth one individual’s antidote against the ‘lives of quiet desperation’ led by the working class in mid-nineteenth-century America” (Thoreau 5).Notice the author’s last name is in parentheses, followed by the page number where the quotation can be found.
As you are starting to write your first draft, you can start expanding the summary in your annotated bibliography entries for a few key sources. You may find that there are a couple of sources that are really important for your reader to understand. If this is true for you, you will want to introduce those key sources early in your paper to give your reader a sense of context.
For most of your sources, though, you will probably not need to summarize them for more than a sentence or two. Analysis will be the larger part of using these sources. You may want to think about which sources will pair well together so that you can compare and contrast, which can help your reader get a clear sense of what is going on in an argument.
We have already talked about the role of synthesis in your thesis statement, but you will also need to do some synthesis work in your body paragraphs. Your thesis will not be your only original claim you are making. You may, for instance, argue that a specific source needs to be updated by further research because some other source has made a new discovery. This is synthesis! You are putting two things together to make something new! You may also find that you need to make something new because you need to adapt source material for a new audience. There are lots of opportunities for synthesis in body paragraphs where you are doing this kind of work. We will explore strategies for summary, analysis, and synthesis in later tutorials.
While the first sentence of a paragraph will do a lot of transition work for you, your final sentence of the previous paragraph can be a great place to set up where you are going next. You don’t want to introduce the next topic at the end of a paragraph, but you can help your reader see where you are going.
After you have completed a body paragraph, check the validity, or soundness, of your logic. To perform this check, begin by assessing the logical connection of your topic sentences to your thesis statement. Because the topic sentences are the major supporting statements for your thesis, each one should support it. Ask and answer the following questions of each topic sentence:
Next, check the validity of your body paragraphs’ development. To perform this check, answer these questions on all the major supporting ideas that you develop for each topic sentence:
