Materials Needed: pp. 27 and 41 in your Analytical Response to Literature guide; set of pens. Participants will copy the sentence provided on p. 27 and take notes on p. 41.

The Topic Sentence (TS) is the first sentence in a body paragraph. For literary analysis, the topic sentence is not a summary sentence that starts a report, as many students have done before they come to us. In literary analysis, we are looking for an analytical topic sentence with a subject and an opinion, which we call commentary, and no, or virtually no, concrete detail.