This author does not understand topic sentences: First, many seem to have received little writing instruction in high school. I initially noticed this as an un

This author does not understand topic sentences: First, many seem to have received little writing instruction in high school. I initially noticed this as an undergraduate English major at Yale, where I helped peers revise their papers. I saw it again in graduate school at Tufts, where I taught freshman writing classes. And it has also struck me at Babson, where, for the past two years, I have instructed first-year students. Maybe in informal academic writing, there's a special kind of topic sentence whose purpose is to introduce an opportunity for promiscuous name-dropping. I.e. in an essay on insomnia, one might write: "I usually wake up late. It's because I go to parties at Noam Chomsky's house, or on Richard Dawkins' yacht, or..."