This is a strong thesis statement because it narrows the subject to a more specific and manageable topic, and it also identifies the specific causes for the existence of hunger. How to Write a Thesis Statement. You start out with a thesis statement like this: Sugar consumption.
You change your thesis to look like this: Reducing sugar consumption by elementary school children. You revise your thesis statement to look like this: More attention should be paid to the food and beverage choices available to elementary school children. You decide to explain what you mean about food and beverage choices , so you write: Experts estimate that half of elementary school children consume nine times the recommended daily allowance of sugar. You finally revise your thesis statement one more time to look like this: Because half of all American elementary school children consume nine times the recommended daily allowance of sugar, schools should be required to replace the beverages in soda machines with healthy alternatives.
A strong thesis statement takes some sort of stand. Here are two thesis statements: There are some negative and positive aspects to the Banana Herb Tea Supplement.
This is a strong thesis because it takes a stand, and because it's specific. A strong thesis statement justifies discussion. If your assignment is to write a paper on kinship systems, using your own family as an example, you might come up with either of these two thesis statements: My family is an extended family.
A strong thesis statement expresses one main idea. For example: Companies need to exploit the marketing potential of the Internet, and Web pages can provide both advertising and customer support.
One way to revise the thesis would be to write: Because the Internet is filled with tremendous marketing potential, companies should exploit this potential by using Web pages that offer both advertising and customer support. A strong thesis statement is specific. For example, if you're writing a seven-to-ten page paper on hunger, you might say: World hunger has many causes and effects.
A revised thesis might look like this: Hunger persists in Glandelinia because jobs are scarce and farming in the infertile soil is rarely profitable. Wells Library E. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
Click HERE to see what we think is the thesis sentence of this essay. What has happened to the American male? For a long time, he seemed utterly confident in his manhood, sure of his masculine role in society, easy and definite in his sense of sexual identity. The frontiersmen of James Fenimore Cooper, for example, never had any concern about masculinity; they were men, and it did not occur to them to think twice about it. Even well into the twentieth century, the heroes of Dreiser, of Fitzgerald, of Hemingway remain men.
But one begins to detect a new theme emerging in some of these authors, especially in Hemingway: the theme of the male hero increasingly preoccupied with proving his virility to himself. If you have to write an expository essay about an important invention, you might ask:. In a literary analysis essay about the novel Frankenstein , your question could be:. After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question.
At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the process of researching and writing. Now you need to consider why this is your answer and how you will convince your reader to agree with you. As you read more about your topic and begin writing, your answer should get more detailed. Argumentative thesis statement The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education : the internet facilitates easier access to information, exposure to different perspectives, and a flexible learning environment for both students and teachers.
Expository thesis statement The invention of the printing press in the 15th century allowed for much less restricted circulation of information in Europe, paving the way for the Reformation. Literary analysis thesis statement Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Victor Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on ; he starts out as a naive but sympathetic idealist, but by the end we see him as a thoughtlessly cruel figure.
In an argumentative essay, your thesis should take a strong position. Your aim in the essay is to convince your reader of this thesis based on evidence and logical reasoning. Take a look at these two versions of a thesis statement in an essay about U. In this improved thesis statement, you also state your reasoning and summarize the main points that you will use to convince your reader of your position. The rest of your essay will expand and argue for these points. Scribbr editors not only correct grammar and spelling mistakes, but also strengthen your writing by making sure your paper is free of vague language, redundant words and awkward phrasing.
See editing example. The thesis statement generally appears at the end of your essay introduction or research paper introduction.
Example of an essay introduction The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. Some textbooks attempt to break down the kinds of essays into categories like "informative," "persuasive," "expository," or "argumentative. No good essay is entirely informative or entirely persuasive.
Almost any good essay will have to inform the reader at some points and persuade the reader at others. But every good essay is unified, moves toward a single major point. Thus every good essay has a thesis statement, though it may be implied rather than explicitly stated in the text of the essay.
If you are writing a primarily "informative" essay rather than a primarily "persuasive" essay, that doesn't mean your essay doesn't have a thesis; it just means that your thesis is a statement about which your readers are uninformed, rather than one on which they may have opinions that differ from yours. Whatever kind of essay you are writing, you want to decide before you finish it what the point will be, where it's going. Thus you want your thesis statement to express in a sentence what your whole essay says, what you want your readers to know or believe or understand by the end of the essay.
You don't just want the thesis statement to be a general conclusion that someone might reach from your essay; you want it to say what your essay says. One problem with many, perhaps most, trial thesis statements is that they are too general and hence do not really give any guidance as to what issues and what evidence will be in this essay.
You may have been asked in a previous class to put your thesis statement in the first paragraph of your essay. There is nothing wrong with putting the thesis statement in the first paragraph, if that will help you to get your point across to your readers. But many excellent essays do not state the thesis statement in the first paragraph. The decision as to whether to do so should be based on what will work best with your subject and your readers.
However, the tradition of putting the thesis in the first paragraph has led some students to mistakenly think of the thesis statement as a kind of introduction to the essay. In some cases, the thesis statement works well as part of the introduction; in some cases it doesn't. But a thesis statement is not necessarily part of the introduction, and in developing your thesis statement you should not be thinking primarily about how you want your essay to start.
You should be thinking about what you want the whole essay to say, what you want the reader to know or believe at the end of the essay, not the beginning. This is why you often cannot finish your thesis statement until you finish your essay. Why should you write a thesis statement when you write an essay?
What is it good for? Is it just busy work? Something English teachers are required to impose on students to keep them from having any free time? One of those long traditions that everyone has forgotten the reason for? I don't think so. Developing a thesis statement is an important part of the process of writing an essay. In fact, you really can't write a good essay without developing a thesis statement. Of course, to "develop" a thesis statement doesn't necessarily require writing it down on a piece of paper and handing it in with your essay.
But that is what I will ask you to do for every essay you write. So I'll have to answer this question in two parts: First, why do you need to develop a thesis statement? Second, why do I ask you to write it down and hand it in? First, why do you need to develop a thesis statement when you write an essay? The reason is that, using the definition of a thesis statement given above, you can't write a good essay without one. In fact, it flows from the definition of an essay that an essay cannot fail to have a thesis.
An essay is "a short piece of nonfiction that tries to make a point in an interesting way. If it doesn't make a point, if it's just a random bunch of paragraphs about the same topic that never come to any conclusion, then it isn't really an essay.
Notice that the definition says that an essay tries to make a point in an interesting way. Most essays don't completely succeed for all readers. Having a thesis is no guarantee of a good essay. You might try to make a point, and fail. But if you don't have a point to make, if you don't have a thesis, then you can't possibly succeed.
When I talk about "having a thesis," I don't mean that you have to have the thesis before writing the essay. When you write you are creating ideas. One of the things that makes writing so interesting and exciting is that, in the process of writing, you almost always discover ideas and connections between ideas that you didn't recognize before. Even if you have a clear idea of what you think you want to say before you start to write, you will usually discover that in the process of writing your idea changes.
Often you will have to start writing with only a question to answer or a topic to explore, and you'll have to write your way to a thesis. You will keep revising your thesis statement as you revise your essay. Where the thesis statement is most important is at the end of the process, during revision. You want your essay to come to a point, to have a clear thesis that every reader will understand.
This brings us to the second question. Even if we accept that every good essay does have a thesis statement, often that thesis is implied by the essay and not explicitly stated. But I am going to ask you to submit your thesis statement in writing with every draft and every essay you write. What's the value of writing out your thesis statement on a piece of paper?
If you know the point you are trying to make, isn't that enough? The basic answer is "yes. On the other hand, if your thesis is clear in your mind, it is very easy to write it down on a piece of paper. It just takes a few seconds.
No problem. Unfortunately, most of us are not absolutely clear in our minds about what point we are making when we write.
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