Making your argument flow

Students often complain about the difficulty of making their writing flow. Perhaps you have experienced the same thing. You can see very clearly what you are trying to say, but your reader can’t. Maybe your lecturer writes comments such as, ‘Your argument doesn’t hang together’ or ‘Your argument jumps about’ or ‘Your poor paragraph structure makes it hard to follow your argument’. They may even say that they can’t follow the argument at all. When you get comments like this, one of the first things that you should check are your topic sentences. The topic sentence is the sentence in the paragraph that tells the reader what the paragraph is about. In most academic writing, it’s the first sentence of the paragraph, but it may come later, especially if the first sentence is used to link a new section of the argument to the preceding section. It may be helpful for you to think about the topic sentence as a signpost that signals for your reader what the rest of the paragraph will be about.