Let's talk about what makes for a great thesis statement. A thesis statement
is basically just the argument of your essay. Typically it comes at the end of
your introduction, so the last sentence or two of the introduction is where
you're gonna find a thesis statement. If you have a longer essay, so let's say ten,
fifteen, maybe twenty pages, it's quite possible that your thesis statement is
going to come a little bit later -- maybe after two or three paragraphs, as it
takes a little bit longer to figure out what you're gonna say. So
there's definitely some flexibility, but in a short essay often the thesis
statement will come at the end of the first paragraph. It should be one single
argument, so one argument, and try to resist the tendency to split your thesis
statement into three component parts. I know a lot of teachers will say, "well, you
know, if you have three body paragraphs then maybe make sure that your thesis
has three points. But that's kind of problematic, because that leads to really
three theses, instead of one. So try to focus on your one argument that creates
the unity of your paper, that ties everything together, and if you do have
some subsections you can mention those, but that should not be the main focus.
Your thesis can also be more than one sentence, as I've mentioned, so try not to
squeeze everything into one sentence. If it doesn't work, then I just split it up
a little bit. So let's have a look at an example here then, and one of the first
things to notice is that a thesis is more than simply a mentioning or a
listing of the topic of your essay. If you look at the first example here, this
one goes: This essay will examine the consequences of legalizing euthanasia.
You can see here that this is kind of announcing that you're going to talk about
something, but you haven't actually said what the argument is. I've seen this
very often, this kind of announcing that there there's going to be
an argument somewhere down the road, but we don't have it here yet.
So avoid having a thesis that's merely a placeholder. The other thing to watch out
for here is what is sometimes called metadiscourse. Metadiscourse
is simply the kind of language we use to talk about the process of
reading and writing, and so on. You don't necessarily need to say
"this essay will examine" or "I will argue." Often you can do without those
phrases. They're not necessarily forbidden, but often they're
ones that you can avoid. If you look at the better version, this one avoids
metadiscourse, but it's also an argument. It's actually making a case. It reads,
"In Belgium, the liberal Euthanasia Act has eroded people's rights, as more
and more people are being killed without their consent. You can see that this is
definitely arguing a particular position. It's arguing against euthanasia,
and it's saying that there's a problem with consent. It can still be more
specific, of course, and we can flesh this out, but it's quite clear what the
argument is here. So try to distinguish, then, between a topic which is our first
one, and an argument, which is our second one. And behind an argument is always
what we call a "research question." So there's always this kind of research
question in the background. In this case the question is, what happened
in Belgium? What was the effect of the euthanasia act? And the answer here is
that it has been a negative effect. It's often really helpful if you can spell
out for yourself what your research question is. It could be a question that
the instructor has given you, but it can also be one that you're posing yourself
or one that you have developed as a result of reading your instructor's
topic. You could sometimes use the research question as the thesis, but
that's pretty experimental. I've seen that a few times. It doesn't always work and
so I hesitate to recommend it, but it is a possibility to at least put that
research question somewhere in your introduction. and then you can answer it in
your thesis. The research question is important because it creates tension.
There should be something at stake in your thesis. There has to be
some kind of tension. If you are interested in the topic of
euthanasia you can just feel the tension in this particular statement. Some people
are going to say, "yes there is now more euthanasia, but it's good, and
people's consent is being honored and respected." And then other people are
going to say, "yes, but whose consent is this, and who gets to say who gets to die?"
So a lot at stake then and that's where we want some real tension in the thesis.
Another thing to think about as you as you look at your thesis is also the
scope of your thesis. If your thesis is too broad or too big it may not be
something that you can actually prove in a few pages. And this idea of proving is
also important. A thesis has to be provable. You can make really large
claims, but if you can't provide evidence and actually prove it, that presents
problems. Let's look at one more example here, and this one takes us through three
separate stages as we try to develop our thesis. I think that's important to point
out, because sometimes we're kind of lazy with the thesis. We just throw something
onto the page and then we don't necessarily revise it. So here we've gone
through a process of revising to make the thesis better. The weakest
version reads, "During the early modern period, mercantilist theory (that's sort
of an economic theory) provided an interesting perspective on the value of
imports." Watch out for words like "interesting" or "fascinating," because often
they say well this topic is important, but they don't say why the topic is
important. So ask yourself this question: why? That's sort of the driving
question behind everything. Why care? Why is this significant? And we need to spell
out what is interesting about this.
The better version reads, "During the early modern period, many mercantilist
writers argued for high import duties in the belief that a nation's strength is
measured by its exports." This is fairly specific, which is great.
It focuses on import duties and it focuses on this idea of the nation. But it's still not
[really] great, because it's really stating a fact. You can read read up on this and
it's stating this fact, and probably it doesn't take too much to prove this. We
can find one or two mercantilist authors who make this kind
of claim and then we can be done. The better yet version at the end here
creates a lot more tension. So this one goes, "During the early modern period,
mercantilist writers capitalized on nationalist sentiment (people thinking
about the good of the nation) in order to argue that a nation strength is measured
by its exports. The resulting imposition of taxes on imports lead [led] to greater
profits for merchants, but also drove up prices for ordinary people" In that sense
what was good for the merchants was not necessarily good for the nation. You can
see that it's taken us three sentences to unpack this idea and make
sure that we convey what's at stake here. But now we have a lot of tension. We have
a tension between what's good for the merchants and what's good for the nation.
We have nationalism versus mercantilism and then we sort of summarize it at the
end. But if you just read the last sentence you wouldn't get the whole
thesis here. And so if you want to be more compact you could
rewrite this and make sure that the last sentence was more detailed. So
this is a somewhat more informal thesis because we've already said quite a bit
and so the last sentence is a little bit more like populist writing. It's
less specific, but it kind of sums up what came before. Think about tone
then. Think about your audience. If you find that your audience is not going to
be happy with this and wants everything crammed into one complex sentence that's
fine. If you're writing for a more popular audience then this kind of final
summation here is great. It's a bit more
casual than what you might expect in the typical academic essay. Hopefully
that gives you some ideas for writing effective thesis statements. Always ask
those questions: so what? who cares? why is this important? And I think
if you show what's at stake then your reader is going to be fascinated and is
going to be interested in reading the rest of your essay.