Transcription
This is the garden of English. I'm Tim Freitas, and today we're going to talk about creating topic sentences and writing body paragraphs for the argument essay. Check it out. Okay.
We are continuing our series with the argument essay, and like I mentioned earlier, we're going to talk about topic sentences and body paragraphing as a whole. If you haven't already checked out the other videos that we've done in this kind of—I don't know—unit, for lack of a better term, about writing arguments, you want to check those out right up here, uh, in the corner. I also want to, just as I'm shrinking myself up, remind you that you'll want to subscribe now so that you can continue to get, you know, tips and tricks for helping out with preparing you for your AP Lang exam. But these tips and tricks aren't just for preparing you for your AP Lang exam; they are actually meant to help you with your writing and thought overall, so that you will indeed actually become a better writer, a better thinker, um, and it will help you in college.
So anyway, I'm going to shrink myself up right up here like I normally do, and we're gonna get right into things here today, as how do we, you know, look at, um, outlining our paper? How do we know what to do for commentary? Uh, how do we know all of these things? So, uh, nonetheless, here I want to remind you of the prompt that we're using. I've read it in every other argument piece. I'm going to assume that you have indeed actually been paying attention to that, so it's still the same prompt about warning labels on troublesome content. If you haven't read this yet, then you're going to want to press pause right now and read the prompt; it's right on your screen here. I also want to just point out that this is indeed from a book that I co-authored. In the document that you can access down below with all the templates and examples, there is a link. If you click right here in the document, it'll bring you to the page where you can actually purchase that. It's a book put out by Perfection Learning. Uh, anyway, uh, please note here that in the last kind of video that I did, we talked about generating a thesis, and I gave you four templates. Believe it or not, I actually changed it to five, so I've kind of updated that here, particularly because I noticed that one of my templates was not—was not as foolproof as I thought. So please note, I added a fourth, and then I also included an example with a fifth just to kind of, uh, make it so that template five always starts with the word "since." So anyway, uh, that's beside the point. What's actually gonna—know what we have to get into for today? If you also don't wanna use a thesis template, you can always increase complexity by just making sure that your thesis has at least one of these words in it, and make sure you punctuate correctly though; that's important. We don't want run-on sentences.
Anyway, I'm going to actually use my thesis from thesis number three in order to present how do we actually plan for topic sentences and also how do we, um, then generate body paragraphs because of it. I'm also going to just present two topic sentences, and I would toss a conclusion on at the end. We'll do a conclusion video next, by the way. I'm not going to write both body paragraphs; I'm only going to show you what one looks like, and I'll talk about how that would then influence the writing of the second. Um, and I'm not here to suggest that the best papers are five paragraphs long or four paragraphs long, but in 40 minutes, I don't know how you can write many more than four paragraphs. I tell my kids, thesis, three body paragraphs, conclusion; or thesis, two really awesome body paragraphs, and conclusion. That is my typical expectation in terms of length. If you have an average handwriting size, you're looking at two and a half pages—that's one side, another side, and then half of the next. That's a pretty common, uh, length for a high-scoring paper. Length does not mean you'll score higher, but that's typically, um, where you kind of see those higher score papers—higher scoring papers being because they actually develop ideas a little bit better.
Anyway, so here's my thesis, and you're going to notice I've got some color coding going on. I'll explain that as I go through today here. Okay, so my thesis, which is based on template 3 found right above here in the document, is this: I'm responding to, "To what extent should we be using warning labels and whatnot?" Here it is: "Although many individuals can find just about any situation offensive, and it's incredibly unrealistic to apply warning labels to everything, placing cautionary labels and ratings on commonly agreed upon troubling content is appropriate." So I've made an argument here. I have a little concession at the beginning of my argument, but then I say, "But please know we should be doing this here." And you're going to notice, okay, then I have color-coded this, and the reason why is because the green here, when you look at my topic sentences, is going to actually be what I put in my topic sentences and clarify as my examples. So I've got them in a very general sense in my thesis. I'm going to get a little more specific in my topic sentences, and then those examples are going to be extremely specific when I write about them. I've got a really good friend named Mike Van Walde, who's an English teacher, and he always says, "Be specific, not Pacific." And he means—what he means by that is the Pacific Ocean is huge and it covers a lot. Being specific is being extremely precise in a small area. And so in our thesis, we can be on the Pacific side, but when we write about our examples in our body paragraphs, we need to be as specific as possible. But anyway, so that's what the green stands for. The orange is my argument. Okay, so you're going to notice that I'm combining here; I'm giving an indication of what I'm going to talk about with examples and argument. So my first examples are going to be individuals kind of finding any situation offensive, and I'm going to talk about how that makes it very hard to apply warning labels to like everything. But then I'm going to shift my paper and actually say, "But you know these cautionary ratings when they're for commonly agreed upon content are indeed appropriate for different reasons," and because of that, I now know exactly what I need to do in my paper. Movement one is prove that it's hard to kind of get this to deal with every issue that we have, but then I'm going to shift to, "But there are times when this is extremely appropriate and it's actually on the easier side to do." So let's actually look at how this influences my topic sentences.
Now you're going to notice right here I've got a topic sentence template. Okay, I'll actually highlight this for you all here, so we'll highlight that in yellow. The topic sentence template. Now this template, just so you know, does not have to go in this order. What this means is that your topic sentences need to have these parts, and if they have these parts, they're really going to direct your body paragraph. So you need to know what a topic sentence is meant to do. So what I have here is this: I have in blue, it says "transitional language." Now transitions for rhetorical analysis essays and literary essays are easy—"the author begins by," "the author then moves to"—transitions are not as easy like that when you write your own argument. You might transition in many different ways. It might be to contrast something before; it might be to augment something that comes before; it might just be, "Hey, I'm beginning here." Do I say, "To begin with"? Do I say—there are many different ways you can transition. Okay, do I admit a concession at first? So is that my transition? Like, okay, anybody can concede that kind of a thing, but you do want your topic sentence to have some sort of transitional language because that tells us where we are in our argument. That also helps us with the line of reasoning because it shows a connection between your paragraphs and your understanding. Next, in the green, you'll notice here that we are looking for a somewhat specific reference to your example, and actually this is an adjectival, so we need to hyphenate that—we need a somewhat specific reference to your example. You're not going to definitely tell me all about your example yet, but you're going to give me something that's going to tell me where your example is going to come from, and then we're going to add in a part in our topic sentence that is our argument. So what is your example, and how does it connect to your argument? Sometimes you can pull this straight down from your thesis; sometimes you can reword it, and once again, it does not have to always go in this exact order. You will see that in, uh, in my second topic sentence, I actually put my example second, and I put my argument first. Okay, so there's no science to this per se, besides the fact that every good topic sentence is going to guide a paragraph by doing it this way. So how—let's check this out with my first topic sentence. So don't forget my thesis says I have to start by talking about my concession, why? Because that's first in my thesis, so I need to concede at the first part of my body paragraph—I mean, in my first body paragraph here. I'm not refuting; I'm not taking the kind of argument and destroying it. I actually admit that this is true. Hey, anybody can find anything offensive, and because of that, this is going to be hard. That's not my actual position though; my position is that we should use warning labels, but I need to concede it's hard in some circumstances. So watch what I do here. I start with my transition that sets us up right—"just about anybody can admit"—I could have very easily said, "It's probably most appropriate to begin with the concession." I could have worded it that way; I didn't do it though because that's not how I talk, uh, and that's not how I write. So my transitional language here for topic sentence one, if I'm going from my thesis into my topic sentence, is gonna be, "Just about anybody can admit that," and now I have, "Recent controversies surrounding the holiday market practices of private businesses." So this right here in the green is now going to tell you, "All right, so he's going to talk about marketing practices of private business." Okay, now I said this doesn't make sense because I haven't read it in full, but I'm going to continue here. "Just about anybody can admit that recent controversies surrounding the holiday marketing practices of private businesses highlight the incredibly temperamental nature of the human psyche, making it quite hard to entirely monitor the troublesome content that's out there." And you'll notice what I've done here is I have taken the argument—"it's incredibly unrealistic to apply warning labels to everything"—and I've made that argument a little bit more specific here, but it fits right under this orange umbrella because why? What makes it so hard and unrealistic? Because humans are temperamental, and it's—you can't deal with all of the troublesome content that's out there. And so because of that, right, I actually have all really strong parts of my topic sentence. Now I'm going to change it up in my example to a little later, I think, just to kind of pare it down a little bit, but even if I don't, it's okay. This is strong because now what I'm going to do is I'm going to describe these controversies of private businesses actually changing their marketing practices in the holiday, and I'm going to explain how does that show the temperamental nature of people, and if we deal with everybody and try to say, "Hey, you know what's going to offend every single person," this becomes impossible to deal with. Okay, and that's going to be my reasoning there. Now because of that, I will have taken care of this part of my argument in my first body paragraph. So we're going to shift to my second body paragraph, which now is going to say, "Cautionary labels on commonly agreed upon things and why that's appropriate." So look at what I have in this next one: "Luckily though"—notice how that language transitions to what I'm trying to actually argue—"Luckily though, amidst the aforementioned astronomical turmoil"—which is humans being temperamental—"there are some areas where most people agree about what constitutes offensive content, especially when it comes to shielding children, and this typically shows up in common media ratings." And look at that, right? Now if you looked at my last video that talked about picking out evidence, you'll see that I had this in my evidence boxes, and that's going to be the marketing practices of Starbucks in 2015 and common media ratings that you would see on Netflix and movies and things like that and video games. So now what's really nice here is that I shift my argument to talk about, "Hey, here's when this is appropriate and can be done." Media ratings are things that people agree upon for the most part, and the reason why it's so appropriate is specifically to shield children. And now we see this argument coming together. When I put a conclusion on there, I'm going to really focus in on my position of how it's appropriate, and that's going to make my paper holistically very much in favor of supporting, um, in supporting media warning labels and media. Okay, so these two topic sentences follow this—or should I say include the parts that come from this particular template right here—and they will guide my paper to a T because what I have to do now for topic—for body paragraph number two is talk about common media ratings that are accepted and explain why that's appropriate for shielding children and maybe even appropriate for other people if people don't want to experience a lot of crude and foul language; that's just not their style. If it's listed even on an adult program—"crude, crude and foul language"—then sure enough, they don't have to watch it, and they don't have a free choice to not do so. Um, so I can get in there, but I'm not showing you that body paragraph today. So anyway, that right there is thesis—sorry, topic sentence templates and how you can actually get those into your topic sentences. Now I could include more topic sentences for my example; I'm just not, for the sake of providing you with an example. When I have my students write long papers, all of their topic sentences have to include transitional language, the argument, and a reference to the example to come, and if they don't, then we go back and we re-outline again. Okay, but this is a great way to outline too, if you write your thesis and just your topic sentences first, because then you have your entire paper set up, and you can rearrange your topic sentences and see if you can clarify your transitions to really make sure that your reasoning and how you transition works throughout your paper to argue what you've said in your thesis. And don't forget, you always want to make sure that you follow the direction of your thesis, and that's what this little red line says here. So that means that I'm starting with my concession right here, and then I'm going to support and confirm what I'm doing here. Okay, now I'm gonna actually—let's see if we can just drop this down. We'll create a new page right here for you all, uh, in the midst of this. And once again, this document is right down below. I do have an evidenced commentary guide. This looks extremely similar to what I showed you in my last video. Once again, you can check it out right up there, but I've added a right-hand column because this is a commentary column. So really what I've done here is I have taken the same exact organizer and added a commentary column, and what I've done here is I've explained what reasoning and commentary is. Right, this is explaining how your evidence proves your claim in your topic sentence that also is related to your claim and your thesis. Okay, and that's what you need to do, but I can say that until I'm blue in the face; that doesn't mean that I've actually showed you how to do it. Well, this right here is a simplified, uh, reasoning template. However, you're going to notice that I'm going to provide reasoning for my topic sentences with this template, and it's still pretty solid. So this is something that you could fall back on that works out really well and in your favor. You're going to notice that where it says "somewhat specific," this is what's going to go—my topic sentence—"the idea of changing year-end holiday titles and materials." Okay, and then I've got—I really went into my specific evidence here, and you want your specific evidence—you want to describe your evidence in three to five sentences. Okay, but please note, whatever—however long your evidence is, your commentary should be just as long, if not longer. So if you describe your evidence in five sentences, you better be ready to provide that much volume of commentary too. Uh, one sentence of commentary doesn't typically cut. But I have—all right—I'm gonna talk about a private business changing their marketing at the year-end. I now have a really detailed description of this happening in 2015 when Starbucks did this and how it coincided with other kind of social trends for making things less Christmas and more holiday. Okay, and now I'm going to use this particular template to actually—to actually provide my commentary, and I'm going to say this: "This evidence"—so we're pointing back to all of the evidence that I just described—and then you choose one based on your topic sentence—"Does this evidence prove your claim from your topic sentence? Does it support your claim from your topic sentence? Does it confirm your claim from your topic sentence? Does it refute it? Does it disprove it? Does it show the limitations of"—you get to pick your verb here. Okay, then it says, "Insert unifying idea based on the claim, whether that be from the topic sentence or the thesis," and then say—"because." Honestly, folks, if you're looking to better your commentary, the best word that you can put in it is "because," or any variant—"since," "because," "due to," "so," "so that," "consequently," that language—oh, and the word "thus"—that language is extremely important in getting you to articulate your commentary and explain how your evidence proves your claim. So let's actually see this in action. Now you can see it here, and it's color-coded, but I'm going to actually scroll down, and oh, here's a blank version for you to actually print out and use on your own, by the way, but I'm going to scroll down here just so that you can see how this actually matches up when you put this into paragraph form. I'm going to scroll out just a little bit, and I'll highlight some things. So here we have our topic sentence. Once again, I'm going to read it, and then I'm going to go right into our example, and I'll explain what's going on in there, and then I'll explain our commentary, and we'll be done for today. So the topic set—it says once again, right, for body paragraph one, which is our concession—we start off as, "Just about anyone can admit that recent controversies surrounding the holiday marketing practices of private businesses highlight the incredibly temperamental nature of the human psyche, making it quite hard to entirely monitor the troublesome content that's out there." Okay, strong beginning to a body paragraph. Next I say, "For example"—now note this is in blue because this is going to help maintain a line of reasoning that's going to showcase the transition—we're transitioning to an example. You don't have to say this, but you can as a nice discourse marker for your reader. Anyway, now I'm going to get into the nitty-gritty about that recent controversy for marketing. "For example, a few years ago, in order to signify their transition to the winter holiday season, Starbucks decided to replace their ornamental Christmas cups with ones that were merely colored red. In response to this change, many individuals posted—protested it by calling it the newest manifestation of the war on Christmas. Of course, this figurative conflict was magnified since in about 2010, around the same season, there had been consistent reports of schools and municipalities re-labeling their Christmas concerts, pageants, and decorations as holiday events and adornments. Also important to note here is"—so notice I'm trying to add a little bit more evidence on, and I use a transition in blue to do that—"Also important to note here is that since the early 21st century, the public has been encouraged by the media to greet others with 'Happy Holidays' instead of the more traditional 'Merry Christmas.'" So notice what I did here: I took the—the Starbucks marketing as my example, and then I tied in kind of, you know, common, um, municipal, uh, practices and community practices and kind of what the media has been adding since, I don't know, like 2008 to 2010. So this is great evidence here. Now what we're going to do is we're going to say this proves and highlights that people are temperamental and therefore it makes it almost impossible to put warning labels on everything. So here we go. Let's look at how this fits in the commentary. So I have this evidence—and notice that's green—so that means I'm referring back to all of the evidence. If I wanted to, I could break the evidence in parts if I wanted to, but we're not doing that right now. We're going to use the simplified template so that you can see that it still functions really strong. Okay, we have this evidence confirms—and now we're going to pull the idea down from the topic sentence—"What idea does this evidence confirm? The easily offended nature of human beings." That is the same exact thing as "incredible temperamental nature of the human psyche." I am honestly saying the same thing here, so I just pull it straight down. "This evidence confirms the easily offended nature of human beings because"—and now my red is all of my reasoning, all of my commentary—"because many took something as simple as the coloring of a cup and turned it into a figurative war on an ideology, which technically is impossible, right? You can't actually have war with an ideology; you can have war between two parties and two people, but with an ideology that doesn't even think—doesn't work. Interestingly enough"—notice a transitional phrase there—"the change to the red cup"—that's green because that goes back to some evidence still—"showcases actual Christmas colors." I'm now providing some commentary—"especially when combined with the green Starbucks logo." So notice there's some cause and effect language there to help with my reasoning—"most individuals who knew just about any element of Christmas tradition should have been able to clearly see that the company wasn't necessarily neglecting Christmas at all." So notice I'm bringing my commentary in, and I'm bringing in some assumptions—"if you know anything about Christmas, you would know that red and green is just as Christmassy as a Christmas tree"—and yet—"notice I have a transition here—the lack of ornamentation somehow became a firestorm of controversy when in reality a color of a cup change"—now notice that's in green—"all I'm doing is recounting some of my evidence here. Now another transition—even if the cup were made less ornamental"—like it mentions in my evidence—"less ornamental to be more inclusive, much like the language the municipa—the municipalities and schools have begun to embrace"—so I'm commenting back on my evidence—"this is ironically polarizing"—since commentary language there that helps us provide logic and reasoning—"this is ironically polarizing since it further highlights the fickle nature of humanity"—goes right back to that topic sentence idea—"the social divide is not, however, due to the fact that"—or reasoning language here—"the colors or language are off-putting, but rather because individuals make bigger deals about petty things than they should." There it is—"how are we connecting this back to the idea humans are so temperamental? Because they make bigger deals out of things than they should." "In fact, it doesn't make sense that someone who's part of a larger community wouldn't want to be more inclusive in their public lives, especially during—during a season that is meant to highlight charity towards others. Quite often, people are taught to respect other people and be sensitive toward personal differences." So notice that this right here deals with stereotypes, um, and common assumptions about and connotations about language and seasons at this point, right? So there's our cause and effect language—"this deep-seated defense in becoming more communally inclusive is actually quite puzzling and even borderline nonsensical, standing in dark and stark contrast to the accepted morals, particularly for the season. The silliness of this controversy as evidence"—that's why this is in green—"further promotes the point that trying to anticipate, let alone label what may offend others, is quite a murky science since"—cause.
And effect language that helps with commentary. Offense can be quite an unreasonable free-for-all for any individual. Now multiply the opportunity for the individual insult by seven billion individuals that make up the global population. Yikes. And this right here, this last part, connects all of what we were talking about back to why it's unrealistic to apply warning labels to everything.
Notice that my commentary down here in this last sentence is actually a little bit more implied than explicitly stated, but that's okay because it works out perfectly. But now look at how I transition after my commentary and how it goes with my next topic sentence. To then now say, "But we should do this anyway. We should focus on running labels." Luckily though, amidst the aforementioned astronomical turmoil, there are some areas where most people agree about what constitutes offensive content, especially when it comes to shielding children. And this typically shows up in common media ratings.
And then, sure enough, I would go into, for example: "Here are some common media ratings and categories. Here's how this helps with shielding children. Here's why that's appropriate." And then I move into my conclusion about why we should continue to do this universally. My paper is done. But notice that my example of commentary here follows this little template to a T, to a T. It relates everything in my topic sentence with commentary and evidence, and it attaches it to my thesis. And because of that, we've got a clear line of reasoning. And that, folks, is how you want to do it.
Now, would I expect anybody to actually, or any student who's just learning how to do this, to actually produce commentary uh as thoroughly as I did here? Absolutely not. Right. If you can make it halfway through what I've done here, that's perfectly fine and acceptable as we practice this. But these are just ways that you can actually provide commentary. There's a template for it; there's a formula for topic sentences. And if you know how topic sentences guide your body paragraphs, then you can actually write a really strong body paragraph really well.
So if that video was helpful, I'm going to ask that you support the Garden of English by liking and subscribing. Right. You can also find other ways to support the Garden of English. You can purchase some of our merch; there are some links down below. Um, you can actually check out our Instagram to see what some of that merch even looks like if you don't click on the links down below. You can follow us on Instagram; in fact, I encourage you to do so. Um, and I also encourage you to follow us on Facebook as well. And we're going to come back with how to write conclusions for argument in our next video, probably by the end of the week. If not, we'll do it early next week. But until then, I hope you all have a great one. [Music]