THESIS STATEMENT DEVELOPMENT
Learning Objectives
- What is a thesis statement?
- Review the types of thesis statements.
- Misconceptions
- Identify audience, tone, and content.
- Review the types of thesis statements.
- Misconceptions
- Identify audience, tone, and content.
What is a thesis statement?
Steps To Write Effective Thesis Statement
- Choose a prompt or, if appropriate, select a topic: television violence and children
- Read the prompt carefully or, if appropriate, ask an interesting question:
- What are the effects of television violence on children?
- Revise the prompt or question into a preliminary or "working" thesis:
- Violence on television increases aggressive behavior in children.
- Avoid general phrasing and/or sweeping words such as "all" or "none" or "every".
- Lead the reader toward the topic sentences (the subtopics needed to prove the thesis).
- Anticipate the counter-arguments. Once you have a working thesis, you should think about what might be said against it. This will help you to refine your thesis, and it will also make you think of the arguments that you'll need to refute later on in your essay. (Every argument has a counter-argument. If yours doesn't, then it's not an argument—it may be a fact, or an opinion, but it is not an argument.)
- Violence on television increases aggressive behavior in children.
- This statement is on its way to being a thesis. However, it is too easy to imagine possible counter- arguments. For example, an observer of societal trends may believe that parenting or easy access to weapons are important factors in youth violence. If you complicate your thesis by anticipating the counter-argument, you'll strengthen your argument, as shown in the sentence below.
- While poor parenting and easy access to weapons may act as contributory factors, in fact when children are exposed to television violence they become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others, are more fearful of the world around them, and are more likely to behave in aggressive or harmful ways toward others.
The Types of an Effective Thesis Statement
You can't just pluck a thesis out of thin air. Even if you have a terrific insight concerning a topic, it won't be worth much unless you can logically and persuasively support it in the body of your essay. A thesis is the evolutionary result of a thinking process, not a miraculous creation. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment.
An effective thesis statement fulfills the following criteria
The best thesis statement is a balance of specific details and concise language. Your goal is to articulate an argument in detail without burdening the reader with too much information. |
Questions To Review Your Thesis
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Misconceptions about Thesis Statements
- Every paper requires one. Assignments that ask you to write personal responses or to explore a subject don't want you to seem to pre-judge the issues. Essays of literary interpretation often want you to be aware of many effects rather than seeming to box yourself into one view of the text.
- A thesis statement must come at the end of the first paragraph. This is a natural position for a statement of focus, but it's not the only one. Some theses can be stated in the opening sentences of an essay; others need a paragraph or two of introduction; others can't be fully formulated until the end.
- A thesis statement must be one sentence in length, no matter how many clauses it contains. Clear writing is more important than rules like these. Use two or three sentences if you need them. A complex argument may require a whole tightly-knit paragraph to make its initial statement of position.
- You can't start writing an essay until you have a perfect thesis statement. It may be advisable to draft a hypothesis or tentative thesis statement near the start of a big project, but changing and refining a thesis is a main task of thinking your way through your ideas as you write a paper. And some essay projects need to explore the question in depth without being locked in before they can provide even a tentative answer.
- A thesis statement must give three points of support. It should indicate that the essay will explain and give evidence for its assertion, but points don't need to come in any specific number.