The Omnipotent Topic Sentence

What makes good writing? Is it the explicit use of the all-powerful topic sentence hovering over your words, clarifying and organizing your paragraphs? Richard Braddock in “The Frequency and Placement of Topic Sentence in Expository Prose” debunks the mythology behind the simple, explicit topic sentence. He states, “I estimate that only 13% of the expository paragraphs of contemporary professional writers begin with a topic sentence” (280). He discovers this scintillating statistic after a tedious counting of “T-units,” and an equally tedious description of his process. His measurements are interesting in that they confirm what I long suspect (and by long, I mean back to freshman high school English) that writing students have oft been taught a stilted form of writing that in no way mirrors the good stuff they read.

Ken Macrorie in “from Telling Writing” gives this stilted form of writing a name: “Engfish”—a smelly fish-like substance that resembles the English language. The examples he gives of bad student writing are delightfully bad in their ability to use words that say nothing. And, as he points out, language arts text books have for eons modeled the exact kind of writing that no one would want to read: “If you are a student who desires assistance in order to write effectively and fluently, then this text book is written for you” (298). They showcase writing that contorts wilty words students don’t understand—or even want to understand—and create examples that have no relevance to a student’s life. He talks about a writer who “places his vocabulary on exhibit . . . rather than put it to work” (300).This can be said of both student and textbook writers.

While I delighted in reading Braddocks’s desire to diminish the simple topic sentence and reveled in Macrorie’s examples of Engfish, I wonder: “How can you teach good writing?” Macrorie offers the practices of free writing—with or without focus—as a means of teasing out good writing. He seems mystified as he defines the technique, “Apparently the writer put down words so fast he used his own natural language without thinking of his expression” (302).

I, as a writer and sometimes teacher of writing, agree with Macrorie’s amazement at the mystery of freewriting to surprisingly wriggle out good writing. Yet, there is also a place, in the beginning, to teach students the science of creating a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank, explicit topic sentence. It is simply good exercise for the writing muscles. Topic sentences create a map for readers, but more importantly, they create a map for writers. This brand of topic sentence, amusingly described, by Francis Christensen, as “a sort of ectoplasmic ghost hovering over the paragraph” (283), teach fledgling writers the ability to see an omnipresent organization that exists in good writing. Once they grasp that, they can move onto the more sophisticated versions, as defined by Braddock: the delayed-completion topic sentence, the inferred topic sentence or the assembled topic sentence.

It is this ideal that Christensen in “A Generative Rhetoric of the Paragraph” espouses--the ideal that students must practice technique before they can master the art. He states:

“The teacher who thinks that writing is an art and that art cannot be taught, that the teacher can only inspire and then keep out of the way will not find anything he can use. But the teacher who believes, as I do, that the only freedom in any art comes from the mastery of technique . . .” (296)

It reminds you of Picasso, who had to master painting women as they looked before he could successfully paint a woman with a breast on her forehead. But, the mistake most teachers make is clinging to the familiarity and comfort of the clunky and explicit topic sentence, requiring students to stick to the formula long after they have mastered the notion.

This again brings me to the question: “What makes good writing?” I think Macrorie says it well, “ most good writing is clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising, memorable, and light” (311). In this great, seemingly conclusive list, we don’t see mention of topic sentences. They are tools of the craft . . . not the craft themselves.

Seeking Truth: Innate Knowledge vs. the Information Superhighway

The timeline featured in Tuesday’s lecture graphically reminds us that our relationship with language has traveled through time. Just as our economies have evolved, our use of language has too. For centuries, we have used language to discover truth—with a capital or lowercase “t.” Socrates promoted the use of questions as a truth-discovery tool. Yet, now we arrive at truth by amassing information.

We may still ask questions as we navigate through jungles of information. But, Socrates encouraged questions within—discovering the innate knowledge we inherited at birth. Now, we comb through external knowledge, hoping to explore the information generated by a variety of truth-tellers.

In our readings this week, we learn that Edward Tyrell Channing, a Boylston Professor from 1819 to 1851, recognized the revolutionary role of information in modern rhetoric. Information, he theorized, helped to create informed audiences, nurtured individual thoughts and opinions, and opened up the American market place of ideas. I don’t know enough of the history of composition to know if his thoughts were a turning point, but this idea is certainly interesting to contemplate in our current day crowded by information.

Our ability to connect with information changed dramatically over the last century. Over an entire lifetime, people, at the turn of the 20th century, absorbed the same amount information that can currently be found in a single issue of the Sunday New York Times. Developments over the last 100 years in mass media created new technological ways to explore and share information. The most recent, of course, is the Internet. The Internet, whether with a capital or lowercase “i,” has created a world where information is infinite.

As a student and writer who is often required to research, this access to information is fantastic. Consider the ability to read literary theory using Google books—no trips to the library, no clunky theoretical tome. Despite obstacles like China’s censorship of Google and America’s persisting digital divide, this abundance of information has mostly broken through barriers and provided access to new and greater audiences.

With all that in mind, infinite and immediate information has created interesting side effects that impact writing. A glut of the information market (remember supply and demand) has decreased the value of information. People now believe (remember Google books) that information should be free. While free information is certainly nice to have, it is also responsible for the demise of institutions like the print newspaper. Who wants a cumbersome mound of ink-smudged paper filled with annoying ads and inserts, when you can easily read any newspaper in the world—or your favorite niche blogger—from your laptop? Yet, trained writers are paid to investigate and write these same stories read for free online. To continue paying these writers, newspapers struggle unsuccessfully to find new ways to charge readers for using their web-based news. (Just this morning, the New York Times announced its intentions to charge for frequent access to articles on its web site. Something, I predict will fail.) In his book Free, author Chris Anderson forecasts a world populated by many more writers who mostly are unpaid. He suggests that current paid writing positions will quickly evolve into part-time gigs that are either paid or not.

As some of us pursue the profession of writing, we may be entering a world that will no longer pay us to perform our craft. And, as we witnessed in class on Tuesday, access to literacy and education revolutionized the world. Will global access to information and the rise of everyday writers do the same? Has it already?