Perhaps you’ve been asked to write a review of a book or a work of art. Or perhaps you’ve been asked to write about a proposed change in law or an event in history. Or you might have been asked to write about the ethics of a philosophy such as vegetarianism. All of these topics invite you to have an opinion and to make a critical analysis in support of that opinion.
Thesis statement vs. topic sentence
First, it’s good to know what a thesis statement is and what it’s not. A thesis statement is not a topic sentence, although, in some cases it may well be your first sentence. Confused yet? Hopefully not! A topic sentence is the main sentence that outlines what each paragraph in an essay is about, but the thesis statement is the MASTER topic sentence for the entire essay.
In my last blog, I wrote about the two main functions of commas. First, they show readers where to pause and take a breath while they are reading. Second, they also indicate the grammar of a sentence. Nowhere do these two functions come into conflict more than with the infamous comma splice.
