Against the Topic Sentence

The topic sentence is the only literary form taught by every school on earth, which should have been our first warning. Nothing universally mandated is innocent. We hand children a rule — say what the paragraph will do, then let the paragraph do it — and we call this clarity, though it resembles clarity the way a receipt resembles a meal. The rule has a birthplace and a birthday: Alexander Bain, Aberdeen, 1866, a logician’s dream of prose in which every paragraph is a small bureaucracy with its purpose posted at the door.*

Consider instead how a paragraph behaves when it is written by someone thinking rather than someone filing. It opens on a detail — a river, a letter, a smell of diesel — and the point arrives the way weather arrives, sensed before it is named. Woolf almost never tells you what a paragraph is about; the paragraph is about the time it takes to find out.† Baldwin will open with a door and close with a verdict. The trained reader experiences no confusion in this, only company. We are walked somewhere, not summoned to a conclusion that has been standing there since the first line, checking its watch.

I want to be precise about the charge, because the topic sentence has honest work — briefs, abstracts, memos, any writing whose reader is trying to leave.‡ The charge is that we have let a format for the impatient become a definition of good prose, and in doing so we have taught three generations that thinking in public must begin with its result. The essay — the form named for attempt — is the one place where the sentence should be allowed to go first and find out later whether it was the topic. This magazine exists in the margins of that conviction.