Topic sentence text.
Step 1: This often becomes the subject of your topic sentence. It should be a theme or an idea. Do not use an example as that is perhaps not as important as the ideas. Examples are used to support or further explain an idea. If you make the example the subject of the discussion, then you must have missed the idea. Often, the idea is a common theme derived from a series of readings or it might be an idea from a dominant essay. For the purposes of this class, I often give you the idea based on the readings we have done, in this case, it is existential obligation.
Step 2: Because an idea can be put into any context, say for example, our existential obligation toward individuals with different religions. Then, the issue of discussion is freedom of religion. However, we are now dealing with the issue of homelessness, so you need to contextualize existential obligation with homelessness. You do that by using prepositional phrases, as in “Our existential obligation toward the homeless.” This focuses the reader onto a particular topic—homelessness. Be careful with prepositional phrases. Do not overuse them by adding a bunch of them. It makes the sentence too heavy and readers often forget the subject. So, let’s say we should limit it to two.
Step 3: This is a three part process. The first part, a, is to establish your personal position. You have to know whether you are in agreement with the idea or not. You can also have partial agreement. The problem with partial agreement is it loses the sense of focus in some cases. For now, let’s work with either agreement or disagreement. Choose between A or B. So the question you should ask is “Our existential obligation toward the homeless” is choose A or B. A is “Good, right and wonderful,” while B is “Bad, wrong and horrible.” More often than not, I think most people would choose A for this case. Of course, you have a right to choose either positions, but you have to defend that position when you develop the topic sentence into a topic paragraph.
The second part is to question your own position. I prefer that you write out the complete question, “Why is our existential obligation toward the homeless good, right and wonderful?” In this way, you will be forced to see the relevance of the reasons you provide to a concrete question. If the question isn’t clear, then you might not know if your reasons are relevant or not.
The third part is to provide three reasons to answer the question you have raised in the part b. I ask for three reasons because it will force you to think in complex forms, instead of the usual one-on-one mapping to street discussions. List all three of the reasons and make sure they are relevant to the question. Also, you probably need to know the idea pretty well in order to come up with good reasons to answer the question. The tendency is to look for reasons from the assigned readings, but you should not use reasons already given in the readings. If you do that, then you will be forced to summarize the reading. This is where you show independent thinking. Make sure that you do not recycle reasons from the readings in your own words. Your response to the idea is by far more interesting to the readers than your ability to repeat ideas already discussed in the text.
Step 4: After you have given the three reasons, you should use them. Combine the steps 1-3 into ONE complete sentence. This requires that you have some sentence ability. You are after all, in English 1, and you should be able to write a complete, compound or complex sentence. You may refer to the combining clauses and uses of conjunctions for help if you need to. If you are able to write a sentence like this, you will have a very strong topic sentence.