Went to the Lafayette Apple Festival today – loads o’fun.
Here’s what Braddock says. Pretty straightforward, but some interesting connections:
Braddock, Richard. “The Frequency and Placement of Topic Sentences in Expository Prose.” In Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, 2nd ed. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003.
Braddock, in response to the popular paragraph model prescribed by composition textbooks, which direct students to write expository paragraphs that begin with a topic sentence, shows through researching a set of 25 essays that this formula holds true with only 13% of paragraphs written by professional writers. He discovers four general types of topic sentences: simple and delayed-completion topic sentences, which are more explicit, and assembled and inferred topic sentences, which are more implicit. All in all, professional writers only wrote explicit topic sentences – the kind taught in textbooks – half the time. He challenges writing instructors to look more closely at how professional writers write and to teach students how to complicate their expository prose through writing a variety of the four kinds of topic sentences.
Interesting to Note:
Braddock confines the implications of his research to “teachers and textbook writers should exercise caution in making statements about the frequency with which contemporary professional writers use simple or even explicit topic sentences in expository paragraphs.” I think this study has more reach than this. I see connections to Perl’s article – it shows that althought there is a prescribed model that seems to make sense and works most of the time, such as the writing “process” and the write-a-topic-sentence-first rule, it does not hold true for all writers or for all rhetorical situations. Judging the quality of an expository essay alone on whether or not there is a topic sentence at the beginning of every paragraph is overlooking the important part: what the essay does. I don’t think anyone really evaluates an essay based on such rudimentary, mechanical criteria as this, however. I think Braddock might be overplaying the importance of the topic sentence. My family laughed out loud when I read them the title. I mean, really.
But it is interesting to see that the “good” writers break the rules. There is something to say about knowing that a topic sentence or an organizing idea is needed to make a paragraph work. I think the good writers internalize that maxim and have it play out in a variety of ways in their own prose, hence Braddock’s four types of topic sentences.
He does admit to a hierarchy of topic sentences: major topic sentences, that deal with more of the paper than just a single paragraph, and subtopic sentences, which refer to smaller points within the larger work. He uses Kellogg’s T-unit to split the paragraphs into T-units: the topic “sentences” are really topic “T-units.”
I think there can be some interesting connections between Braddock’s study and the debate over the writing process(es). There is no one way to write, but there probably are methods one can teach a struggling writer to implement in order to make his or her prose more fluid. Including one of the four types of topic sentences is one of those ways.
Coincedentally, the morning before I read Braddock’s article, I was working with one of my students on topic sentences. She was educated in India and was expressing trouble with writing in the American academic system. Every essay should has turned in thus far has received low grades. When I looked at her final essay for the Mind the Gap Unit, I noticed she didn’t really include any topic sentences. She would just move from evidence to evidence without explaining what that evidence was suppossed to prove or how it was being used. Therefore, in our meeting, I actually went through a couple of paragraphs from CRITICAL ENCOUNTERS and showed her how to incorporate topic sentences.
Anyway, what I really wanted to say was that when I was writing my master’s thesis, my mentor told me that I should make sure I frontload my paragraphs with topic sentences. She told me that in academic writing, readers expect to see those topic sentences in that position. She told others and me to actually go through our essay and make sure we had the topic sentences in place. She said, at the time, that she realizes it is formulaic, but that her doctoral committee made her do the same thing when writing her dissertation.
What interests me then is the genre of academic writing in relation to Braddock’s argument. The articles he was looking at were not created in an academic setting. If the genre of the academic essay values explicit topic sentences near the beginning of most paragraphs, do we have an obligation to teach our students to place them there?
I would like to think, of course not; however, part of our responsibility as wrt 1o5 teachers, from my understanding, is to teach academic writing. How helpful then is it to teach our students to use topic sentences like professional writers use them in other genres when academia expects something alltogether different? Is there ever an appropriate time to teach students to make conscious decisions such as carefully placing topic sentences at the begining of sentences even if this pedagogy borders on a current traditional model?
Comment by legries — October 8, 2006 @ 2:40 am |
I wonder, too, about the sample that Braddock used, drawn from “_The Atlantic,_ _Harper’s_, _The New Yorker_, _The Reporter_, and _The Saturday Review_” (Braddock 190). These are public “essays,” which are not exactly like students’ “academic essays.” We don’t have access to the essays, and we are not told what they are about, so there are real genre and audience questions here. An essay, in the tradition of Montaigne, may wander and explore, and many public essays in such publications tend to have an exploratory quality. They also make particular assumptions about their audiences (what they know and don’t know about particular subjects). They may not be topic-sentence driven for good reasons: journalistic conventions, essayistic conventions for a public audience. As Braddock notes, we should temper our comments about what professional writers tend to do with topic sentences in their work. Yet I think Braddock needs to temper his comments with a discussion of the differences in genre. What is the difference between a public essay in a major public print publication and an academic essay written by a student under specific instructions to produce academic discourse (or something to that effect)?
While I think there is a lot of truth to Braddock’s study, let’s face it: both sets of writers (students vs. public essay writers) face very different considerations of audience, different genres, etc.
Comment by Eileen E. Schell — October 8, 2006 @ 1:11 pm |
Hey all. So interesting. This article led me direclty back to Writing 105 as well – esp. in terms of the Mind the Gap. What does it mean that we assigned a “thesis-less” essay? What does the rheotoric of inquiry mean when placed in this context?
Braddock’s study, while problematic for many reasons that Laurie and Eileen point out, is useful in its challenge to reconsider what we teach in face of what we do as stereotypically gifted writers.
Laurie’s discussion of her Master’s thesis is so interesting to me because I had the complete opposite experience during my early graduate work. Working with mostly literary theory critics or literary theorists themselves, there was a way in which a disdain surrounded ideas of topic sentences, paragraph transitions, etc. These professors weren’t composition teachers, mind you, but they were English professors who graded the writing of English majors. So, I’m wondering if this topic sentence tension isn’t coming from an attempt on the part of gifted writers to give a tool to the struggling writer. Obvious, I know, but it seems that the “struggling” writer is often assumed to be aided by “tools” like topic sentences, grammar reviews, etc. when in fact the issue is argumentation, critical thinking, etc. Hence, I think, Braddock’s desire to reach into public discourse as a way to illustrate the various forms of engagement on the page. While the study may be problematic, isn’t the analytical move illustrative? If we are working post-social turn in composition, where does the kind of academic/public discourse binary split, converge, blur, etc.? What are we teaching in relation to what we are expecting? Do we hope for a magazine article’s resonnance when reading a student’s analytical paper? What happens when those audience roles aren’t considered as we pick up the grading pen?
(And a PS to Laura – I have taught in several different institutions, including a 4 year liberal arts college, in which topic sentences are not only addressed, but cited as a reason for a below average freshmen composition grade. People really DO seem to grade based upon current-trad notions such as a rigid sense of topic sentences, transitions, summative conclusions, etc….)
Comment by gazingwestward — October 8, 2006 @ 9:01 pm |
I agree, topic sentences are about thinking, and I have sat through presentation papers (accepted by a committee, mind you) that were just not clarified. Once the thought is developed, the topic sentence might be dropped. But as so often happens in student writing, the premature, forced topic sentence is as bad as no topic sentence.
Comment by immy Wallenfels — October 9, 2006 @ 1:05 am |
This seems to be an extremely contraversial topic (who knew?). My first instinct was to say, “we need to eradicate the word ‘topic sentence’. We need to focus our attention on the paragraphs themsevles and the ways in which they (translation–ideas) speak to one another. Also, the word ‘topic’ seems to have a disconnect to ‘idea’. Can an idea really have something called ‘topic’?” So, that was my teacher response.
On the other hand, I am a PhD student. The reading load is heavy, and therefore, (as told to by every faculty member my cohort and I encountered) it is necessary to skim articles. And how do you skim articles? Many say to read the first and the last sentence of each paragraph. So it’s interesting to think about your mentor, Laurie, and the truth behind her statement. And also your statement about teaching academic writing. Like you, my immediate reaction would be to never mention the words ‘topic sentence’ out loud. By doing so, I think it’s necessary for us as teachers to ask ourselves, what would be the consequences in doing so? Are we doing a disservice to our students? How do we explain this in a way that doesn’t give our students the impression that writing is formulaic?
Comment by tanyakrod — October 10, 2006 @ 1:25 am |