Having trouble coming up ideas and topic sentences for the Identity and belonging for context essay. Teacher said that my topic sentences should be short and that I shouldn't be too general about what sort of identity that I was talking about.
Can someone give me some ideas for this practice prompt?
Prompt: The need to belong can completely change who we are.
One of the topic sentence that I came up with: Not only our desire to belong changes who we are, our identity may also influence where we fit in at the same time.
Be careful not to
'topic dodge' with your topic sentences - you want them to isolate a focus that's close to the prompt, even if you want to broaden your discussion later in the paragraph. What you've done in that example is shifted the discussion a bit.
Consider the following:
Prompt: Eating pizza causes happiness.
Topic Sentence: Not only does eating pizza cause happiness, so does eating fruit.
That prompt is calling on you to discuss eating pizza --> happiness, it doesn't say anything about fruit. If you wanted to, you could bring up fruit as a related idea (eg. by talking about the relationship between pizza and fruit by bringing up the ever-divisive Hawaiian style pizza
) but you couldn't have a whole discussion that just focussed on fruit, because that's not technically relevant to the prompt.
So a topic dodge is basically when you take a prompt like 'X is important' and you say 'no, I think Y is important' then just write a paragraph about Y instead. You ARE allowed to introduce new, related concepts, but you have to make sure your paragraph talks about both X and Y in that case, rather than just substituting the prompt's focus (X) with your own preferred one (Y.)
The best advice I can give for your particular prompt is to unpack the relationship between
the need to belong and
who we are. It seems like your T.S. is hinting at the idea that the relationship might be kind of symbiotic in that both of those factors influence one another, which would be a cool thing to explore. Just be careful not to separate the ideas too much since the weakest essays will be those that just have:
- one paragraph on the need to belong
- one paragraph on who we are
- one paragraph on the other things that change who we are
...which is a pretty weak default option.
Instead, aim to answer the question of
why the assertion of the prompt might be true. Why can the need to belong completely change who we are? Or, on the flip side, why might it not
completely change us? Those big questions is where your paragraphs should end up, so hopefully you'll find a way to reverse-engineer your topic sentences from there.
Let me know if any of that didn't make sense
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