to illustrate general ideas which arise.  Since the language we use is but the expression of the thoughts we have, it happens that many of our paragraphs are made up of general statements and the specific instances used to illustrate these statements.  When the topic sentence is a general statement, we naturally seek to supply specific instances, and the writer will most readily make his meaning clear by furnishing such illustrations.  Either one or many instances may be used.  The object is to explain the topic statement or to prove its truth, and a good writer will use that number of instances which best accomplishes his purpose.

In the following selection notice how the topic statement, set forth and repeated in the first part of the paragraph, is illustrated in the last part by means of several specific instances:—­

Nine tenths of all that goes wrong in this world is because some one does not mind his business.  When a terrible accident occurs, the first cry is that the means of prevention were not sufficient.  Everybody declares we must have a new patent fire escape, an automatic engine switch, or a high-proof non-combustible sort of lamp oil.  But a little investigation will usually show that all the contrivances were on hand and in good working order; the real trouble was that somebody didn’t mind his business; he didn’t obey orders; he thought he knew a better way than the way he was told; he said, “Just this once I’ll take the risk,” and in so doing, he made other people take the risk too; and the risk was too great.  At Toronto, Canada, not long ago, a conductor, against orders, ran his train on a certain siding, which resulted in the death of thirty or forty people.  The engineer of a mill, at Rochester, N.Y., thought the engine would stand a higher pressure than the safety valve indicated, so he tied a few bricks to the valve to hold it down; result—­four workmen killed, a number wounded, and a mill blown to pieces.  The City of Columbus, an iron vessel fitted out with all the means of preservation and escape in use on shipboard, was wrecked on the best-known portion of the Atlantic coast, on a moonlight night, at the cost of one hundred lives, because the officer in command took it into his head to save a few ship-lengths in distance by hugging the shore, in direct disobedience to the captain’s parting orders.  The best-ventilated mine in Colorado was turned into a death trap for half a hundred miners because one of the number entered with a lighted lamp the gallery he had been warned against.  Nobody survived to explain the explosion of the dynamite-cartridge factory in Pennsylvania, but as that type of disaster almost always is due to heedlessness, it is probable that this instance is not an exception to the rule.

—­Wolstan Dixey:  Mind Your Business.

EXERCISES

A. Which sentences make the general statements, and which furnish specific instances, in the following paragraphs?