RC - Topic Sentence

keets993

Hey all! I've seen a lot of questions about RC recently so I thought I'd share something I've noticed.

I've read, analyzed, and written quite a few papers and I've noticed that despite what it might feel like, RC passages do adhere to certain rules for good writing. More specifically, RC passages contain topic sentences!

Topic sentences are sentences, generally at the beginning of the paragraph, that outline the structure of the paragraph. They are kind of the "road map" or main point of the paragraph. The same can be said of the last or second-last sentence of a paragraph. The last sentence either serves as a summary of the paragraph or function as a transition to the next one.

The point is, I've found that (in the small sample size of RC passages I've tried this with) there's always one sentence in a paragraph - whether it's in the beginning, middle or end - that accurately states what the function or purpose of the paragraph is. Identifying that sentence is a good way of coming up with a low/high res summary. You can simply shorten it up or paraphrase it as your low res and add in the details to make it high res. By combining the topic statements for each of the paragraph's in a passage, you come up with a pretty good summary of the passage as a whole. This also allows you to keep your summary low-res and not get confused by all the details.

For example, "Some animals need human intervention to prevent a sharp decline in population. For example, foxes are the natural predators of a specific species of birds - ones that tend to subsist primarily on plants - despite the fact that these birds feast on plants that are sometimes toxic to the immune system of foxes. Foxes that consume these birds, and as a result are exposed to chemicals toxic to their immune system, become violently ill and in some cases, passed away. The foxes that do survive do not build a tolerance to the toxins nor do they alter their diets. Scientists have proposed a dramatic ...."

This was just something I made up but here the topic sentence is "some animals need human intervention to prevent a sharp decline in population." You can make it low-res by focusing on keywords like "some animals need human intervention" or "human intervention."

Let me know if this helps people out!

ebalde1234

Very good thanks for sharing