Once you have decided on what you intend to accomplish in an essay, you need to state your point, which is called a thesis statement. Your thesis is a clear statement that announces exactly what you want to say and serves as a framework for your entire essay. In other words, it is a good idea to spend time preparing the right thesis statement for your essay.
The thesis statement is the key to most academic writing. This is important and worth repeating: The thesis statement is the key to most academic writing. The purpose of academic writing is to offer your own insights, analyses, and ideas—to show not only that you understand the concepts you’re studying, but also that you have thought about those concepts in your own way, agreed or disagreed, or developed your own unique ideas as a result of your analysis. The thesis statement is the one sentence that encapsulates the result of your thinking, as it offers your main insight or argument in condensed form
Most writers can easily create a topic: television viewing, the Patriot Act, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The more difficult part is creating an angle (also known as "focus"). But the angle is necessary as a means of creating interest and as a means of indicating the type and organization of the information to follow.
At what point do you write a thesis statement? Of course, this varies from writer to writer and from writing assignment to writing assignment. You’ll usually do some preliminary idea development first, before a thesis idea emerges. And you’ll usually have a working thesis before you do the bulk of your research or fully create the supporting details for your writing. Think of the thesis as the mid-point of an hourglass. You develop ideas for writing and prewriting, using various strategies, until a main idea or assertion emerges. This main idea or assertion becomes your point to prove - your working thesis statement.
Once you have a working thesis statement with your main idea, you can then develop more support for that idea, but in a more focused way that deepens your thinking about the thesis angle. Realize that a thesis is really a working thesis until you finalize the writing. As you do more focused research, or develop more focused support, your thesis may change a bit. Just make sure that you retain the basic thesis characteristics of topic and angle.
In short, the basic breakdown of a thesis statement is:
Although you have creative control over your thesis statement, you still should try to avoid the following problems, not for stylistic reasons, but because they indicate a problem in the thinking that underlies the thesis statement.
In the U.S., it’s customary for most academic writers to put the thesis statement somewhere toward the start of the essay or research paper. The focus here is on offering the main results of your own thinking in your thesis angle and then providing evidence in the writing to support your thinking.
A legal comparison might help to understand thesis placement. If you have seen television shows or movies with courtroom scenes, the lawyer usually starts out by saying, “My client is innocent!” to set the scene, and then provides different types of evidence to support that argument. Academic writing in the U.S. is similar; your thesis statement provides your main assertion to set the scene of the writing, and then the details and evidence in the rest of the writing support the assertion in the thesis statement.
As a writer, you have the option of placing the thesis anywhere in the writing. But, as a writer, you also have the obligation to make the thesis statement idea clear to your readers. Beginning writers usually stick with “thesis statement toward the start,” as it makes the thesis prominent in the writing and also reminds them that they need to stick with providing evidence directly related to that thesis statement’s angle.
Attribution:
English Composition I. Schoolcraft College.
Attributions:
"Writing an Effective Thesis Statement" Youtube, uploaded by tulsaccprof, 17 Dec. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sx42_C10zw&t=5s
Permissions: YouTube Terms of Service
