Bench & Bar March/April 2026

EFFECTIVE LEGAL WRITING

A BASIC BUILDING BLOCK FOR READABILITY THE CRITICAL ROLE OF TOPIC SENTENCES IN LEGAL WRITING:

BY MARCIA M. ZIEGLER

A h, the topic sentence. I recall learn ing about this underutilized concept somewhere around the fourth grade, promptly filing it in the recesses of my nine-year-old mind, hoping it would never resurface. My undergraduate education certainly didn’t dwell on the use of topic sentences, and for many years I wrote without even considering how I started out each paragraph as long as the grammar was solid and it (mostly) made sense. When I started teaching legal writing, however, I quickly became aware of just how crucial topic sentences are to clarity, readability, and persuasion. As I reflect on my years of giving feedback to students, my most common yet most effective comment on their work has been “where are your topic sentences” followed by a carefully chosen number of question marks and exclama tion points to convey the appropriate level of consternation. Topic sentences deserve more praise and emphasis than legal writers typically give them. A topic sentence—ideally positioned at the start of a paragraph—serves as a thesis marker for that portion of analysis, signal ing the paragraph’s main idea and orienting the reader to the argument that follows. In legal memos and briefs, where dense rea soning and complex precedent must be communicated to busy professionals, the topic sentence is not merely stylistic; it is foundational to readability and retention, and good legal writing requires its consis tent inclusion.

COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE SERIAL-POSITION EFFECT You probably know that we remember what we read first, last, and most often— this emphasis on primacy, recency, and repetition is called the “serial-position effect” in the field of cognitive psychol ogy, and it underscores why strategically placed structural cues like topic sentences matter. Research on the serial-position effect demonstrates that human recall is disproportionately influenced by the first and last elements in a sequence--the pri macy and recency effects—while middle information tends to be less memorable. In classic experiments, participants recalled items at the beginning and end of word lists far better than items in the middle, creat ing a U-shaped recall curve; this pattern reflects that early input is readily encoded into memory while input in the middle of a passage is more difficult to recall. 1 These memory phenomena apply to reading comprehension: information encountered at the outset of a paragraph is more likely to be remembered by the reader. In the absence of clear topic sentences, essential points may be buried in the middle of para graphs, where they risk being overlooked or even ignored. Repetition further influences retention and comprehension. While primacy and recency affect a reader’s ability to recall information, well-placed repetition of key ideas through out a paragraph reinforces those concepts

in the reader’s mind. Topic sentences, then, allow for a point to be introduced and then supported by the sentences in the paragraph that follow it—leading to a persuasive, cogent argument enhanced by the structure that our brains crave. In legal writing, this kind of scaffolded reiteration helps judges, clerks, and opposing counsel track complex legal reasoning across multiple analytical layers and leads to a better understanding of our arguments. THE PRESSURE OF TIME ON BUSY READERS Legal professionals are notoriously time-constrained and cognitively taxed. Judges balance heavy caseloads; lawyers juggle calendars full of brief writing, client counseling, and drafting pleadings. Empir ical study 2 of legal readers’ habits suggests that traditionally dense, unstructured para graphs demand more cognitive effort than many readers are willing or able to expend. 3 In this context, topic sentences function as cognitive waypoints—markers that reduce search time, minimize cognitive load, and allow readers to grasp the main focus of an argument quickly. The use of topic sentences is a structural imperative, not a stylistic choice; omitting topic sentences forces readers to do inferen tial work the writer should be doing. How many times have you read a paragraph, only to have to stop halfway through to second guess the writer’s point? When a reader must tease your focus out of a wall of text, they waste effort—and wasted effort leads

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