Come up with a topic. Before beginning to write it is necessary to know what topic you want to write about. Once you have decided on a topic, you can begin to research as needed for the paragraph. In this article, the topic for the example paragraph that is provided is what is on the writer's work station.
Write the topic sentence. After you have your topic set, the next step is to write the topic sentence. For example, "The employee's work station is covered with different items."
Decide if the topic sentence you wrote is acceptable. The best way to decide if the topic sentence is a good one is to ask yourself a series of questions. Does the topic sentence make you ask questions? With the above example, it does ask questions, such as what are the items on the employee's work station.
Another question to ask yourself is whether or not the topic sentence gives an indication of what the rest of the paragraph is about. Again, the above example does, as it lets the reader know that they will be finding out about the employee's work station.
Change the topic sentence if you need to. The following are examples of topic sentences that might need to be changed.
"The employee has a chair." This sentence does not focus in on anything.
"The employee has a lamp, a pen, and lots of books on her desk." This sentence gives too much information and does not let the rest of the paragraph do the work of answering questions raised by the topic sentence.
"The employee is a packrat and never cleans her work station." This sentence gives irrelevant information that has no relation to the rest of the paragraph, and so it can be left out here, but perhaps included in another paragraph.