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In expository writing, a topic sentence is a sentence that summarizes the main idea of a paragraph. [1] [2] It is usually the first sentence in a paragraph. Also known as a focus sentence, it encapsulates or organizes an entire paragraph. Although topic sentences may appear anywhere in a paragraph, in academic essays they often appear at the ...
For example, in the sentence "As for the little girl, the dog bit her", the subject is "the dog" but the topic is "the little girl". Topic being what is being talked about and the subject being what is doing the action can, also, be distinct concepts from the concept agent (or actor)—the "doer", which is defined by semantics , that is, by the ...
The topic (or theme) of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (or rheme, or sometimes focus) is what is being said about the topic. That the information structure of a clause is divided in this way is generally agreed on, but the boundary between topic/theme depends on grammatical theory.
Provide informative headings, topic sentences, and frequent summaries to help orient the reader. For complex documents, create a comprehensive table of contents. [11] Organize the text logically: the most important information should be mentioned first, in the text as a whole and in every individual paragraph. [10]
Examples are the satiric mode, the ironic, the comic, the pastoral, and the didactic. [ 2 ] Frederick Crews uses the term to mean a type of essay and categorizes essays as falling into four types, corresponding to four basic functions of prose: narration , or telling; description , or picturing; exposition , or explaining; and argument , or ...
The declarative sentence is the most common kind of sentence in language, in most situations, and in a way can be considered the default function of a sentence. What this means essentially is that when a language modifies a sentence in order to form a question or give a command, the base form will always be the declarative.
In rhetoric, a rhetorical device, persuasive device, or stylistic device is a technique that an author or speaker uses to convey to the listener or reader a meaning with the goal of persuading them towards considering a topic from a perspective, using language designed to encourage or provoke an emotional display of a given perspective or action.
A discourse topic is the central participant or idea of a stretch of connected discourse or dialogue. The topic is what the discourse is about. The notion is often confused with the related notion of sentence-level topic/theme , which is frequently defined as "what the sentence is about". [ 1 ]