For more on thesis statements, see Stating and Using a Thesis in Ch. 20.

Main Idea + Slant or Attitude or Point = Topic Sentence

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.

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.

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.

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.

Learning by Doing Shaping Topic Sentences

In a small group, answer these questions about each topic sentence below:

Will it catch readers’ attention? Is it accurate? Is it limited?

How might you develop the idea in the rest of the paragraph?

Can you improve it?

Learning by Doing Reflecting on Topic Sentences

Review the rough draft of a current essay, highlighting or underlining each of the topic sentences. Then ask the following questions: How well does each topic sentence support thesis? Based on the topic sentences, do you understand what will be covered in each paragraph? What revisions would strengthen these sentences? After you have answered these questions and made necessary revisions, write a brief reflection. What have you learned about how to write effective topic sentences? What new strategies might you use in the future?