The Trouble with Topic Sentences
by Albert Leo
Writing for narratives, like the essays that you will write for your college essays, often requires flexing completely different muscles than the ones you use in writing for school assignments. Teachers may assign you to read compelling novels and even teach you some techniques that authors employ for an engaging story, but they often don’t make you use narrative techniques in your own writing.
This is why getting an essay mentor can be so helpful for the college application experience. You don’t want your story to come across clinical, overly formal, or the cardinal sin–boring. One of the most common mistakes that my Essay Narwhals make in their first drafts is an over reliance on using topic sentences as they do in academic writing. Your life isn’t a lab writeup or a persuasive essay, so why treat it that way?
Let’s analyze this topic sentence:
That summer, working at the ice cream shop, I learned the value of patience.
At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything really wrong with the sentence. Topic sentences distill the essence of a paragraph very quickly about what happened or will happen. In the example above, we know what happened, when, and what the author learned. These sentences are great for brainstorming and outlining to give you a quick idea of what your story is about.
In a news article, you want to quickly give the reader information about what they’re reading, which you can do through a topic sentence. Even in an impassioned persuasive essay, you want to partially distance yourself and rely on your arguments. If you want to make a plea about the effects of climate change or learn what happened at a local fair, you use topic sentences to prime the reader.
In narratives, typical topic sentences often fall short, because the reader wants to fall in love with who you are, not necessarily what you did.
- You want to be more granular in the process and journey. When you are given more space to write, don’t squander it on impersonal summaries. If you paint your story in broad strokes, the reader has trouble getting into the nooks and crannies that make up the details that separate you from other people.
- Topic sentences often give away your story. If you right off the bat tell the reader what is going to happen, you ruin the surprise. In the example above, if you say you’re going to be learning about patience, we’re already guessing the arc and choices you’re going to make within the story.
- It is better to let your story naturally unfold. Topic sentences can pull people out of the story. Get the reader to be fascinated with the world and who you are, and people will FEEL your words rather than pass their eyes over them. If instead of giving us a topic sentence about patience, maybe you can start about how since you were not the most athletic girl, your arm almost fell off after the first day from scooping so much.
Let’s assume I’m a narwhal and I want to write about my biggest challenge of how my tusk got damaged and learning to fish without it.
Instead of starting with a topic sentence that sums up the whole story, why not talk about how much you loved fishing expeditions with your pod, and how you used your tusk. Then an accident occurred, and you slowly unveil a process of learning to hunt without the tusk in a new and unexpected way.
People will bond with who you are, and they’ll understand your values by the end of the story without needing you to explicitly spell it out for them. Leave out the troublesome topic sentences. Writing without starting off with a topic sentence will allow you to keep the reader in the moment and in your story.
