 Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. As-salamu alaikum. Today we are going to talk about theme in paragraph writing. Before I get into what a theme is, I would like to tell a little bit about paragraph writing. As we already know that paragraph comprises of three parts, a thesis statement or a topic sentence, sporting sentences and a concluding sentence. Okay, let's get back to what a theme is. A theme is basically a message which author wants to tell its two readers. It is a controlling central idea about any piece of fiction. And the purpose of theme is to give insight, deep insight about life through written words. As we can see that theme is about the big idea. For example, friendship, trust, good versus evil. Theme is basically a significant statement which tells us about the human condition and human nature and it tells about generalized truth about universe. The purpose of a good theme is to teach a valuable lesson about life. What we need to know is that theme is not the topic. Rather, it is a statement or a point of view made about the topic. It's an assertion. How we can identify a theme in any written piece is that first we need to know that theme is not explicit, which means it is not explicitly stated in writing. Rather, we need to infer it because it is stated indirectly and it is implied. So when we are reading a piece of fiction, we need to infer through the words that what would be the theme. Let's take few minutes and look at this exercise where I have given few sentences. You can read it out and identify that the sentence is giving the idea about what concept. I have given examples at the top and you can read the sentences. I hope you are done with the exercise. As we can see that the first sentence when we read it out, it tells us that it is about revenge. Because it is not stated directly in the sentence, we inferred it from reading it out that when we treat, mistreat somebody, they can treat us in a bad way as well. That's how we inferred that it is about revenge. Similarly, when we read the second sentence, we can infer that it is about courage and how we inferred it is through that if we fight our fears, we can be successful. That's how we get to know that the theme of this sentence would be courage. We inferred it. Similar is the case with the last two sentences. When we read it out, we get to know that the third sentence is about jealousy and the last sentence is about dreams. We need to see what is the importance of theme. Theme actually helps the writer to stay focused and it also helps the reader to collect all the scattered impressions of the story and make a whole out of it. The purpose of theme is to communicate truth about human beings, how they act, how they feel, how they thought, which cannot be told through word-by-word truth. There are two things. One is theme and idea. Theme is basically central controlling idea and it communicates generalized impressions about life. On the other hand, idea is a point of view. It's general and theme is a specific insight which writer wants to convey to its readers. As you can see, I have given an example over here that tells you how to write generalized thematic statements. The thematic idea is courage and the assertion about this topic is that it allows people to attempt difficult tasks in their lives even though the possibility of failure is very high. So we can see the statement, the first part of the statement is an assertion about the courage that it helps people or it allows people to attempt difficult tasks even though if there is a possibility of a high failure. We use qualifying verbs like even, because, so that, unless, which can support the sentence. There are few things that you need to avoid when you're writing. The first one is cliches. Cliches are over generalized stereotypical statements which are overly used. Then try not to summarize your work. Try not to over generalize your concept. Try not to use absolute terms. Try not to use names of books. In order to summarize whatever we have gone so far is that, that theme is the bigger picture. It's about the big idea. It's a central controlling idea of any piece of fiction and why authors use it is because they want to be focused and it gives us insight about human nature, human conditions and it about how universe work and the purpose of theme is to give a central idea to the readers.