2016-08-25 Writing: topic sentences and relevance

Greg Malivuk
greg.malivuk@gmail.com
http://www.pastebin.com/u/gmalivuk
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Choose an order to explain the ideas in your cluster, and make an outline from your homework.
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Homework: Complete your outline
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Topic sentences have a topic and a controlling idea.
The topic is the main subject of the paragraph.
The controlling idea is what the paragraph will say about the topic.

These three sentences all have the same topic (English):
English is constantly adding new words.
- I expect to see examples of new English words from a variety of sources.
English borrows words from other languages.
		- I expect to see words borrowed from many other languages.
English is important for many jobs.
		- I expect examples of jobs that use English.
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p. 44-45 - With your partner, choose the best topic sentence for each paragraph.
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p. 51 - Unity: when all the sentences of a paragraph are clearly relevant to the main idea
- A sentence might coincidentally be related to the main idea, but you need to make it clear in the paragraph how it’s related.

The sentence about the Charles River isn’t relevant, because no connection between it and college students is explained. (If the writer had added something about how college students use the river, it would have been relevant.)

“Second, Boston has the feel of a big city, but it’s really rather small.” - This sentence is made relevant by the following sentences, which connect it to college students. This is one of the reasons they like Boston.

“However, some Boston residents complain about noisy or irresponsible college students.” - This is not relevant to a paragraph about why Boston is popular for students.
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Homework: p. 46-47 - Write appropriate topic sentences for these paragraphs.
	p. 52 - Cross out the two irrelevant sentences in this paragraph.