No longer could man be led about on the tight leash of religion a man liberated could strive for the status of Overman. When Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” he did so with an air of optimism. Structure it for your reader!įrom a student essay discussing Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: Remember: no matter how important your message might be, it must also be understandable. Thus they are transitions between the writer’s promise to the reader and the keeping of that promise. That’s because most topic sentences are more specific than the thesis statement that generates them, but still more general than the supporting sentences in the paragraphs that illustrate them. In many cases you’ll see that the underlined sentences make up a coherent paragraph all by themselves (this is an easy way to write an abstract, incidentally). Try this: next time you read an essay, underline only the topic sentences of each paragraph then reread only what you’ve underlined. Like the paragraph, the whole essay should have unity, coherence, and emphasis. Whether explicit or implicit, the topic sentence of each of your paragraphs should come out of your thesis statement and lead to your conclusion. But even if it is only implied by your paragraph, you and your reader should be able to state easily the main idea. Must every paragraph have a topic sentence? Not necessarily: if the main idea is obvious, then a topic sentence may be omitted. There will be relatively few instances in this type of essay when you’ll want to surprise your reader. Remember, you’re not writing a mystery novel. As a point of emphasis a topic sentence – whether you choose to put it at the beginning, middle, or end – allows you to control your writing and guide your reader by expressing the main idea of the paragraph. When you see that its purpose is to support your thesis by developing and connecting your ideas meaningfully, then paragraph structure should appeal to your common sense. The traditional and still useful rule that a paragraph must have unity, coherence, and emphasis only means that it must make sense, that the sentences should fit together smoothly, and that not all the sentences function in the same way. This brings us to the well-known (but apparently not well enough known) paragraph: the basic unit of composition. An important benefit of this is that by distancing yourself from your ideas and putting them in order for your reader, you are forced to shape your own nebulous feelings into clear thoughts. Between “getting it down” and “handing it in” good writers show respect for their readers by organizing their material into recognizable patterns. When Gustave Flaubert asked “Has a drinking song ever been written by a drunken man?” he meant a coherent song. You should respond with genuine feeling and without inhibition to what stimulates you – in our case, a set of texts. When you think about it, there’s no contradiction in the advice of these two American writers. It’s no better to hand in a detached bundle of statements starting nowhere in particular, training along and then fading out – and call it a theme. You wouldn’t hand in a lot of sticks and boards bunched together and call it a table.
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