Read the excerpt of a story below. what causes jen's homework to catch fire? jen took the matchbox into her hands. she had never seen matches before, but she had an idea of how they worked. she took a match from the box and scratched it on the side. nothing happened. she tried again, setting off a tiny spark. on her third try, a flame erupted. startled, she threw the match onto her desk. her homework quickly caught fire.

repetition is used to make the poem come off the page

quite an interesting way to teach topic sentences, because the answer to this question is the best definition of a topic sentence that one can present, it is as if answering the questions taught you how to do it, this is some real teaching, it is terribly well-done.

the topic sentence in this paragraph is:

topic sentences writers stay on track and keep a paragraph from becoming an aimless collection of sentences about an idea.

which incidentally tells you what a topic sentence should be.