Teaching Topic Sentences? Follow These Helpful Tips.

Introduction

As English teachers, we strive to equip our students with the essential skills they need to write strong, impactful essays with well-developed paragraphs. Part of writing these well-developed paragraphs involves teaching topic sentences, sentences that serve as the foundation of a paragraph’s structure that guide both reader and writer through the logical progression of ideas.

Whether it’s for short-answer responses or part of getting students to write, teaching students the importance of a topic sentence and what role in plays in their writing will help them stay focused.

What follows are some tips and suggestions in teaching topic sentences to high school students, whether it’s struggling writers or EL students writing for the first time.

Practice with examples

By default, the best way to help students understand the purpose of a topic sentence is to provide them with examples.

What this means is students must not only know what a topic sentence is, but also how they should be written. In general, topic sentences fall into two types:

Strong topic sentence, which means it’s clearly related to the thesis statement
Weak topic sentence, which means it’s vaguely related to the thesis statement

When teaching topic sentences via note taking or an in-class activity, always include sample topic sentences that are strong or weak so that students understand their distinction.

Consider the following examples:

The impact of climate change on polar bear populations is evident in the increasing loss of sea ice in their habitats.
Polar bears are interesting animals that live in the Arctic.

The first example is a strong topic sentence because it’s specific and clearly outlines the paragraph’s focus. However, the second example is a weak topic sentence because it’s too general and provides no focus.

By having enough practice with strong and weak topic sentences, students will eventually be able to discern whether their own topic sentences are strong or weak.

Connect it to the thesis statement

Another way to go about teaching topic sentences is stating their importance to the thesis statement.

In general, thesis statements fall into two categories:

Strong thesis statement, which lists the arguments or ideas guiding the essay
Weak thesis statement, which is too general and vague

If students have a strong thesis statement, then the next step is helping them understand that the arguments or ideas in their thesis serve as the basis of their topic sentences. In other words, each argument or idea in the thesis will get its own paragraph that’s introduced via a topic sentence.

Consequently, if students have a weak thesis statement, then it means that their paragraphs may lack focus, making it harder to develop topic sentences. In this case, students should revisit their thesis and make it stronger.

Analyze real-world examples

Teaching topic sentences should also involve students reading them in various texts.

News articles, essays, opinion pieces: each of these lend themselves to having students practice identifying topic sentences within paragraphs to better understand how their own paragraphs should flow.

Dedicate part of the lesson or activity to reading a text and identifying topic sentences; model for students how to identify the topic sentence and discuss how or why it provides clarity and coherence to the paragraph itself.

NewsELA and CommonLit are both great places to find texts that align with finding topic sentences. If that doesn’t work or the texts are too difficult, consider using AI and prompt engineering to scale the text to an acceptable level.