A topic sentence spells out the main idea of a paragraph in the body of an essay. It guides you as you write, and it hooks your readers as they discover what to expect and how to interpret the paragraph. As the topic sentence establishes the focus of the paragraph, it also relates the paragraph to the topic and thesis of the essay as a whole. (Much of the advice on topic sentences for paragraphs also extends to thesis statements for essays.) To convert an idea to a topic sentence, add your own slant, attitude, or point.

Main Idea + Slant or Attitude or Point = Topic Sentence

How do you write a good topic sentence? Make it interesting, accurate, and limited. The more pointed and lively it is, the more it will interest readers. Even a dull, vague start is enlivened once you zero in on a specific point.

A topic sentence also should be an accurate guide to the rest of the paragraph so that readers expect just what the paragraph delivers.

Finally, a topic sentence should be limited so you don’t mislead or frustrate readers about what the paragraph covers.

Open with a Topic Sentence. Usually the topic sentence appears first in the paragraph, followed by sentences that clarify, illustrate, and support what it says. It is typically a statement but can sometimes be a question, alerting the reader to the topic without giving away the punchline. This example from “The Virtues of the Quiet Hero,” Senator John McCain’s essay about “honor, faith, and service,” was presented on October 17, 2005, in the “This I Believe” series on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Here, as in all the following examples, we have put the topic sentence in italics.

Years later, I saw an example of honor in the most surprising of places. As a scared American prisoner of war in Vietnam, I was tied in torture ropes by my tormentors and left alone in an empty room to suffer through the night. Later in the evening, a guard I had never spoken to entered the room and silently loosened the ropes to relieve my suffering. Just before morning, that same guard came back and retightened the ropes before his less humanitarian comrades returned. He never said a word to me. Some months later on a Christmas morning, as I stood alone in the prison courtyard, that same guard walked up to me and stood next to me for a few moments. Then with his sandal, the guard drew a cross in the dirt. We stood wordlessly there for a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and walked away.

This paragraph moves from the general to the specific. The topic sentence clearly states at the outset what the paragraph is about. The second sentence introduces the situation McCain recalls. Then the next half-dozen sentences supply two concrete, yet concise, illustrations of his central point.

Place a Topic Sentence near the Beginning. Sometimes the first sentence of a paragraph acts as a transition, linking what is to come with what has gone before. Then the second sentence might be the topic sentence as illustrated in the following paragraph from Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible: The Fascinating History of Everything in Your Closet by Tim Gunn with Ada Calhoun (New York: Gallery Books, 2012, p. 190). The paragraph immediately before this one summarizes how the early history of shoe design often tried to balance competing desires for modesty, alluring beauty, and practicality. This prior paragraph begins, “Modesty got the better of the shoe industry in the seventeenth century” and concludes, “It wasn’t until the late 1930s that sling-backs and open-toed heels gave us another glimpse at the toes and heels.”

Heel height has fluctuated ever since, as have platforms. One goal of a high shoe is to elevate the wearer out of the muck. Before there was pavement (asphalt didn’t even appear until 1824, in Paris), streets were very muddy. People often wore one kind of shoe indoors, like a satin slipper, and another outside, perhaps with some kind of overshoe. One type of overshoe was called pattens, which were made of leather, wood, or iron, and lifted the wearer up a couple of inches or more from the sidewalk to protect the sole of the shoe from grime. Men and women wore these from the fourteenth- to the mid-nineteenth century, when street conditions started to become slightly less disgusting.

End with a Topic Sentence. Occasionally a writer, trying to persuade the reader to agree, piles detail on detail. Then, with a dramatic flourish, the writer concludes with the topic sentence, as student Heidi Kessler does.

A fourteen-year-old writes to an advice columnist in my hometown newspaper that she has “done it” lots of times and sex is “no big deal.” At the neighborhood clinic where my aunt works, a hardened sixteen-year-old requests her third abortion. A girl-child I know has two children of her own, but no husband. A college student in my dorm now finds herself sterile from a “social disease” picked up during casual sexual encounters. Multiply these examples by thousands. It seems clear to me that women, who fought so hard for sexual freedom equal to that of men, have emerged from the battle not as joyous free spirits but as the sexual revolution’s walking wounded.

This paragraph moves from particular to general — from four examples about individuals to one large statement about American women. By the time you finish, you might be ready to accept the paragraph’s conclusion.

Imply a Topic Sentence. It is also possible to find a perfectly unified, well-organized paragraph that has no topic sentence at all, like the following from “New York” (Esquire July 1960) by Gay Talese:

Each afternoon in New York a rather seedy saxophone player, his cheeks blown out like a spinnaker, stands on the sidewalk playing “Danny Boy” in such a sad, sensitive way that he soon has half the neighborhood peeking out of windows tossing nickels, dimes, and quarters at his feet. Some of the coins roll under parked cars, but most of them are caught in his outstretched hand. The saxophone player is a street musician named Joe Gabler; for the past thirty years he has serenaded every block in New York and has sometimes been tossed as much as $100 a day in coins. He is also hit with buckets of water, empty beer cans and eggs, and chased by wild dogs. He is believed to be the last of New York’s ancient street musicians.

No one sentence neatly sums up the writer’s idea. Like most effective paragraphs that do not state a topic sentence, this one contains something just as good — a topic idea. The author doesn’t wander aimlessly. He knows exactly what he wants to achieve — a description of how the famous Joe Gabler plies his trade. Because Talese keeps this purpose firmly in mind, the main point — that Gabler meets both reward and abuse — is clear to the reader as well.