Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 January 19

= January 19 =

Topic sentences, in reality
Topic sentence, an article I've just now very lightly revised, starts off by telling us that "In prescriptive grammar, the topic sentence is the sentence in an expository paragraph which summarizes the main idea of that paragraph."

A bit of a confusion there, between (A) prescriptive "In prescriptive grammar, the topic sentence is the sentence in an expository paragraph which should summarize the main idea of that paragraph", and (B) descriptive "[cut] The topic sentence is a sentence in an expository paragraph which summarizes the main idea of that paragraph" (if such a sentence is present at all).

The sources given point toward (A); although (as in so much prescriptive stuff) they too are rather muddled.

There's not much in the article that's purely descriptive. My own, underinformed impression is that:
 * A large percentage of competently written expository paragraphs do start with what can be called a topic sentence.
 * This encourages the freshman university "academic English" industry to expect a topic sentence somewhere.
 * A small percentage of competently written expository paragraphs have as an opening sentence some sort of rhetorical ploy and then as their second a topic sentence.
 * Most of the (considerable) remainder of competently written expository paragraphs lack any single, unambiguous topic sentence.
 * The "academic English" industry is unfazed by this, and insists on identification ("academic reading") or production ("academic writing") of such sentences.

And thus that the insistence (and not mere recommendation) of a "topic sentence" might be a received idea that perhaps should be tossed out together with, say, "learning styles".

But Googling "topic sentence myths" brings lots of hits ... for earnest lessons about topic sentences in the context of writing about myths.

I'm very open to being proven wrong. Is there evidence for the actual (and not merely presumed/desired) near-ubiquity of single-topic-sentence-equipped paragraphs within well-regarded expository/academic English prose? 133.25.247.203 (talk) 02:47, 19 January 2017 (UTC)


 * That form works well for scientific papers, but if you are trying to convince somebody of your argument, it's not a very good choice, as you may lose the audience you are trying to convince. For example, had Jonathon Swift's A Modest Proposal started by saying "The English should treat the Irish better", it would have been completely ignored. StuRat (talk) 03:13, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Farce is a very different sort of writing than Exposition. -- Jayron 32 01:54, 20 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Hello, original questioner again (perhaps with a slightly different IP number).


 * StuRat (and anybody): If books that purported to teach "academic writing" simply said that a large percentage of well-formed expository paragraphs ïn English started with a sentence that summarized the entire paragraph, and that such sentences could be called "topic sentences", I'd have no reason to disagree. But they tend to go further, saying that almost all well-formed expository paragraphs ïn English have a single sentence (often at the start) that summarizes the entire paragraph. And the books aren't content with this: they then present paragraphs for each of which the poor student has to identify the topic sentence. Looking at these, I often think that sentence X approaches this ideal closer than do sentences Y and Z, but that it falls short of being a topic sentence as previously defined.


 * I'm aware that I may come off as having some personal beef with the orthodoxy of writing about academic writing, and that this page isn't a soapbox. But I'm also aware that I could be wrong. So I'm trying to get beyond mere received wisdom. As far as I've seen, the textbooks don't give evidence for their claims. Does anyone here know of any evidence? 133.25.54.12 (talk) 04:14, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

What to say cousin in Tamil?
What to say cousin in Tamil? --Curious Cat On Her Last Life (talk) 09:20, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
 * https://translate.google.com/#en/ta/cousin --217.140.96.140 (talk) 12:53, 19 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Note, however, that Dravidian kinship terminology distinguishes all sorts of cousins, so you need to know what kind of relationship you mean. See for example "Kinship Terms in Jaffna Tamil Dialect". ---Sluzzelin talk  13:21, 19 January 2017 (UTC)