The topic sentence is often the first sentence in a body paragraph. It introduces the topic of the paragraph, naming the key idea or concept that you will develop in that paragraph. Topic sentences often also contain a transitional phrase to let the reader know if in that paragraph you will be discussing an idea that builds off of the previous paragraph or diverges from it.
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1st Edition: A Guide to Rhetoric, Genre, and Success in First-Year Writing (No Longer Updated) by Melanie Gagich & Emilie Zickel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
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