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Revising your writing: topic sentence paragraphs

One of the helpful revision tips I’ve picked up from Rachael Cayley’s book Thriving as a graduate writer is to construct topic sentence paragraphs. (Topic sentences indicate the general topic of the paragraph and are usually placed as the opening sentence.)

To do this, create a new document and then copy the topic sentence for each paragraph into this document (I find it easiest to do this a section at a time, but you could do a whole chapter or article). You’ll end up with a paragraph composed of topic sentences. Read through this paragraph and see if it makes sense, and annotate or update the sentences where they don’t flow clearly. Then update the original topic sentences. Typically, I need to add in extra words to link the sentences — I can usually find what I need in the final sentence of the previous paragraph. Occasionally, I need to make a new paragraph by splitting the previous one in two. Cayley recommends that this be done at the end of a substantial revision, because if it’s done too early in the drafting process, all you’ll find is that you don’t yet really have a strong structure, and there are other processes (such as reverse outlines) that are more useful.

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