ENGL000: Pre-College English

Staying on topic is probably one of the most difficult parts of writing well! This difficulty stems from the way that our brains work. Our thoughts do not ever stay on one topic! Instead, our brains jump from one idea to another as we are stimulated by different factors in our environment. A song brings back the memory of an experience, a smell makes you think of a person, and so on…

A great example of this is conversation. I would imagine that most of you have had the experience of a conversation with a friend where you started with one topic, but an hour later, were talking about something entirely different. If you and your friend were to try to trace the path of that conversation, you would have a lot of difficulty.

This is because between your brain jumping from one topic to another and your friend’s brain doing the same, it is almost impossible to stay "on-topic" if the conversation is lasting for any length of time. Now the good news is that in the context of conversation, this is perfectly fine. You and your friend can follow whatever tangents take place because you are both taking part – the experience is interactive.

This is obviously not the case with writing. When you write, your readers do not get to interact with you or respond, so while your friend can follow your random tangents, you should never assume that your reader can.

Our job as writers is to make the job of the reader easy!

If we want our readers to understand what we are trying to express, we must stay on topic and make what we say easy to follow. I am largely talking about paragraphs here (where it is absolutely vital that we focus on one specific topic and message), but even in longer pieces, where we might have multiple points to make that will involve looking at more than one topic and/or more than one message, it is vital that we have a central purpose in our writing and that everything we say is focused on achieving that central purpose.

When it comes to paragraphs, the real key to staying on topic is the topic sentence which will be the first sentence of almost all paragraphs. A good topic sentence should make your writing easy and can be used as a sort of test for your supporting details. Think of what question your topic sentence raises. For example, the topic sentence from a paragraph you read in Unit 1, "My 2008 Ford Fiesta is a horrible car for winter" raises the question, "How is it horrible?" Once you can pinpoint this question, you just need to apply that to every sentence in the paragraph. Anything that does not answer that question is off topic and should be cut.  

Source: Erin Severs
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License.