From the Editor’s Desk: There are No Quick Fixes, But . . .

How to be a more effective writer? Well, there are emotional and psychological cadences that are important for effective writing: confidence, perseverance, perhaps courage. One must be able to tread the inevitable ebbs and flows of motivation. There are no shortcuts, and discipline is imperative. But leaving those emotional and psychological registers behind for the moment, I’m reflecting on the one piece of technical advice that I have most often offered throughout my career to the question, “How can I improve my writing?” If I could give but one answer to that question, I think it would be: Attend to your topic sentences

​To be sure, not every type of writing employs topic sentences as such. Fiction, some memoir, even certain types of narrative non-fiction, either avoid, or can get away with avoiding, the use of formal topic sentences. But for most of us toiling in the realms of history and much non-fiction, especially those of us who want our work to carry a strong analytical line, then topic sentences are almost certainly necessary. And if they are necessary, doing them well is crucial.
 
But why are they so important? There are at least two reasons.
 
The first is that the topic sentence introduces the topic of the paragraph. It is the first sentence of the paragraph, and that position gives it crucial work to perform: The first sentence of the paragraph tells you what the rest of the paragraph is going to be about. This seems obvious, but it bears reflection. If your writing seems to meander, if it seems unfocused or imprecise, there is a very good chance that the underlying cause is that your paragraphs address too many topics at once. A strong topic sentence, as a constraint on what the rest of the paragraph can be about, is the necessary fix.
 
Currently I’m reading Isabel Wilkerson’s marvelous The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. This is a book about the massive influx of African Americans from the south to the north that took place between the two world wars. Let’s consider a few of her topic sentences, plucked at random:
 
On page 236, she writes: “He [Robert Foster] was weighing every nuance and eventuality, and the stars seemed to have preordained Oakland.” We know immediately from the topic sentence what this paragraph is about: that Foster had chosen to move to Oakland. Sure enough, the rest of the paragraph details those reasons: Oakland had a large population to give Foster a clientele for his business, and he had a friend already living there. The rest of the paragraph, in other words, merely adumbrates what the topic sentence was already telling us. There are no other topics, beyond the reasons why Foster chose to move to Oakland (e.g., who he met there, how he got there, what he thought it was like, etc.), present in this paragraph.
 
Another example. On page 423, Wilkerson writes: “He [Foster again] would have guests from back east and up the coast and from all over the country.” You know, without reading the book, what this paragraph is about: a big party! And sure enough that is indeed the topic, a big party with “the best hams and the finest heavy bond paper for the invitations.” Again, the topic sentence announces the topic, and the paragraph fills in the details.  
 
The topic sentence is what keeps your paragraph thematically coherent, and therefore what keeps your narrative arc flowing properly. It tells what the paragraph is about, which also means, by definition, what the paragraph is NOT about. Tighten up your topic sentences, force them to constrain what then follows in the paragraph, and your paragraphs will become tighter, more coherent, and the narrative will be more readily followed by your reader.
 
The topic sentence, often, also carries another function, one related to the above. If it constrains the theme of the paragraph, announcing what the paragraph is NOT about, the topic sentence also carries the transition from one paragraph to the next. In the above example about Foster moving to Oakland, even without reading the book we know that in the previous paragraph, Foster was carefully considering various reasons and motivations for his move. In the second example, we know the previous paragraph was about his determination to have a party. There would be no reason to consider having guests if there were not. In this case, the transition is subtle, but subtle transitions are often the best.
 
Consider another example of the transition function, a topic sentence from page 186 of Mark Whitaker’s electric Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance. Whitaker writes “From the beginning, the operation was a Herculean struggle of man against nature.” We KNOW that this paragraph will be about some difficult (i.e., “Herculean”) struggle. In this case, that struggle is the  building of the Burma Road during World War II by African American troops under the command of General Joseph Stillwell. Can you spot the transitional part of the sentence? That’s right, it’s contained in the phrase “the operation.” That is, the previous paragraph introduced “the operation” (i.e., the building of the Burma Road), giving broad strategic and engineering details. The paragraph announced by this topic sentence, by contrast, begins the story of how that construction was undertaken and the brave men who toiled and sweated to make it happen.
 
Now consider the topic sentence for the next paragraph: “Bolden described the mission as ‘Green Hell.’” This is a chapter on the famed Pittsburgh Courier reporter Frank Bolden, who covered the story of African American troops building this road for the paper. The first paragraph in question introduced the topic of the road broadly, followed by the paragraph mentioned above detailing the heavy labors of the men who built it. That paragraph was then followed by this third paragraph, an account of Bolden’s journalistic descriptions of the project in the newspaper. You can see in this topic sentence both the topical function (“Bolden described . . . ‘Green Hell’”), as well as the transitional function (“the mission,” i.e., what we just described in the previous paragraph.) These are effective topic sentences because Whitaker is a subtle writer who writes with precision and economy, but also because the topic sentences are doing all the work he needs them to do: introduce and constrain the paragraph topic, and transition from the previous paragraph.
 
Topic sentences are load-bearing parts of your narrative, likely the most important load-bearing parts. Because they distinguish paragraph from paragraph, they distinguish theme to theme and subtheme to subtheme. They provide the order that you need to build interest and tension. If they are working, your piece is likely working. If the piece is not working, it’s almost certainly because there is a lapse in the topic sentences somewhere.
 
Let me emphasize part of what I just observed. Tension is a good thing to have in a piece of writing. By that I mean narrative tension, the careful parceling of information, the thing that pulls your reader along as he or she grows more eager to find out what happens next. That tension is built out of contrast: this thing is not like that thing, it’s different. The differences can be subtle or can be great, but the point is that without difference, we can’t distinguish one piece of writing from another. Narrative collapses, interest wanes, and the possibility of analysis evaporates. Topic sentences are the first breath of contrast that your reader encounters as they move from one paragraph to the next. Again I emphasize the point: Draw your topic sentences effectively, with both topic and transition, and your reader will be pulled along naturally from one contrasting point to the next.
 
Grab a favorite book off your shelf and flip through it randomly, noting the topic sentences. Can you identify the a)announcement of the paragraph theme and b) the transition from the previous paragraph? If you can identify both of those, you can certainly accomplish the same feat in your own writing. You might even try the exercise with this blog post (but don’t judge me too harshly!)
—David J. Snyder