A sentence is a complete idea, conveying a statement, question, exclamation or command, starting with a capital letter and ending with an appropriate mark of punctuation (a period, question mark, exclamation point or full stop). A sentence may be simple, compound, complex, or compound-complex.
A topic sentence establishes the subject and perspective of a paragraph and indicates what is to be discussed in that paragraph. It serves several important purposes: it substantiates or supports an essay’s thesis statement; it unifies the content of a paragraph; it anticipates what will be covered in the paragraph; and it advises readers of how the information will be organized.
It is important for a paragraph to have coherence, which means that each sentence in the paragraph develops and supports its controlling idea. To promote coherence, paragraphs should be consistent in their use of point of view, verb tense and number. Inconsistent use of these can confuse the reader and make it more difficult to follow your argument.
A topic sentence should introduce a paragraph’s main point in an interesting way. It should be clear and concise, but it can also introduce a paragraph’s topic with words that imply emphasis or similarity (for example, in contrast, indeed, in addition to, on the other hand). The topic sentence can also introduce contrasting information by using wording that is direct and assertive (for example, it is well-known that cattle farming has significant environmental impacts). Topic sentences are often placed at the beginning of a paragraph, although they can appear later to signal a change in direction.
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