Every good paragraph is made up of sentences discussing a particular subject or rubric called a topic. The topic is what a paragraph deals with. If a paragraph is about education, and the word education is the most recurrent term in the text, the topic of the paragraph is education. Other topics could be war, reading, advertising, success, soothing herbal remedies, stress, technology, high school students’ SAT scores, universal health care, the war in Iraq, terrorism, cloning, global warming, visual art, Cubism, poetry, martial, arts, tennis, soccer, etc.

For example, the topic in the following paragraph is “fact versus opinion.”