To be able to assess the content, organization, and continuity of your writing, you need to be able to identify topics and the focus of those topics. A topic is whatever the segment of text is "about." Topics can occur at all levels: sentence, paragraph, section, chapter, parts of books, and of course books. Topics are the building blocks of your communication. The better you can visualize them, the better you can write and revise. This is especially true at the paragraph and section levels of a document.
That process of capturing the topic and topic focus of each paragraph can be called topic analysis. And it's not necessarily a simple thing to do. But that's the topic of this chapter.
Identifying topics at the sentence level is straightforward—or at least way more so than at the paragraph level. Quite often the topic is at the beginning of the sentence, as the subject. But not always. Consider these examples:
| Individual sentences | Topics |
| Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but controllers opted instead for a close flyby of Saturn's moon Titan. | Voyager 1 |
| The winter solstice occurs (around December 21st) when the angle reaches its maximimum value (about 113.5 degrees). | winter solstice |
| The main advantage of the Mark I was that it was fully automatic—it didn't need any human intervention once it started. | Mark I |
| In 2000, NASA cancelled the Pluto Kuiper Express mission, citing increasing costs and launch vehicle delays. | Pluto Kuiper Express |
Even though advantage comes before it, the topic of the sentence 3 is Mark I; advantage is the topic focus. Sentence 4 presents a challenge: is the topic NASA or Pluto Kuiper Express? Hard to say, isn't it? You can only know by looking at the paragraph context in which this sentence occurs—and you'll see that context in the following.
As mentioned at the beginning, the real value of topic analysis is at the paragraph level and beyond. When you look at a page of, say, five paragraphs, it's not necessarily an easy thing to think about how it is organized. It's much easier if you can make a mental map or outline of the sequence of topics. You shift from looking at 250 words to looking at 15 words—maybe 3 per paragraph. Consider this paragraph and its main topic and its subtopics:
| Paragraph | Topic | Subtopic |
| Pluto presents significant challenges for spacecraft because of its small mass and great distance from Earth. | Pluto | mission challenges |
| Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but controllers opted instead for a close flyby of Saturn's moon Titan. | Pluto | Voyager 1 |
| Voyager 2 never had a plausible trajectory for reaching Pluto. | Pluto | Voyager 2 |
| In 2000, NASA cancelled the Pluto Kuiper Express mission, citing increasing costs and launch vehicle delays. | Pluto | Pluto Kuiper Express |
| The first spacecraft to visit Pluto will be NASA's New Horizons, launched on January 19, 2006. | Pluto | New Horizons |
At the paragraph level (and beyond), you've got more to do. The topic analysis in the preceding doesn't do you much good. You need to define topics and subtopics in terms of the overall focus of the paragraph. The subtopics, in this example, are the topics of all the sentences following the first sentence where the main topic occurs.
Ask yourself what sentence 2 through 5 have in common. They are each about a space mission to or near Pluto. Not all of the mission were to Pluto; one just csme close. Thus the common subtopic could be defined as, let's say, mission, with the "to or near" part understood:
| Paragraph | Topic | Subtopic |
| Pluto presents significant challenges for spacecraft because of its small mass and great distance from Earth. | Pluto | mission challenges |
| Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but controllers opted instead for a close flyby of Saturn's moon Titan. | Pluto | mission |
| Voyager 2 never had a plausible trajectory for reaching Pluto. | Pluto | mission |
| In 2000, NASA cancelled the Pluto Kuiper Express mission, citing increasing costs and launch vehicle delays. | Pluto | mission |
| The first spacecraft to visit Pluto will be NASA's New Horizons, launched on January 19, 2006. | Pluto | mission |
But wait a minute! Subtopics are not always identical to each other. Consider this example:
The preceding has mentioned topic focus. While a topic is whatever the sentence or paragraph is about, the topic focus is what the sentence or paragraph says about that topic. Consider these examples at the sentence level:
| Individual sentences | Topic | Topic Focus |
| Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but controllers opted instead for a close flyby of Saturn's moon Titan. | Voyager 1 | change of mission |
| The winter solstice occurs (around December 21st) when the angle reaches its maximimum value (about 113.5 degrees). | winter solstice | occurrence, definition |
| The main advantage of the Mark I was that it was fully automatic—it didn't need any human intervention once it started. | Mark I | main advantage |
| In 2000, NASA cancelled the Pluto Kuiper Express mission, citing increasing costs and launch vehicle delays. | Pluto Kuiper Express | reasons for cancellation |
As you can see, defining the topic focus is trickier than it is for topics. While a paragraph topic can be something definitive like Pluto, you can phrase the topic focus in any number of ways. As long as your phrase captures the topic focus, you're on the right track.
| Paragraph—main topic: Pluto, topic focus: missions to or near | Subtopic | Subtopic focus |
| Pluto presents significant challenges for spacecraft because of its small mass and great distance from Earth. | —— | challenges to missions |
| Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but controllers opted instead for a close flyby of Saturn's moon Titan. | mission | change of plan |
| Voyager 2 never had a plausible trajectory for reaching Pluto. | mission | not planned |
| In 2000, NASA cancelled the Pluto Kuiper Express mission, citing increasing costs and launch vehicle delays. | mission | reasons for cancellation |
| The first spacecraft to visit Pluto will be NASA's New Horizons, launched on January 19, 2006. | mission | planned mission |
Notice a bit more about what's going on here. Instead of using spacecraft in the topic focus for sentence 1, we used missions. It's for the same reason we reduced all of the subtopics to mission. Your goal is to see the common thread or theme—yes, topic, subtopic, even focus—running through the paragraph. You can see that the individual subtopic focus items don't have as much in common. The common focus seems to be something like what happened or will happen to these missions involving Pluto.
You might have noticed that sentence 1 states a thesis that the rest of the sentences do not support. Sentence 1 cites small mass and great distance from Earth as the problem with missions of Pluto. Sentence 4 does only a distant flyby of that thesis. While some readers might object to this under-developed thesis, it doesn't seem like a problem here in a single paragraph. As readers, we'd have every reason to object if this were the thesis of the whole document and the document never showed how it was true.
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