Tessa on Thesis Statements

During my time at The Writing Center I’ve noticed that students often struggle with creating, understanding, and identifying thesis statements. In fact, this was once a challenge for me early in my academic career. Your thesis statement is the most important part of your paper, and identifying your thesis makes the writing process much easier. First, let’s answer the question: What is a thesis statement? Basically, the thesis states your claim or your reason for writing the paper. For example, if I was writing a paper on the benefits of a university writing center my thesis might look like this:

University writing centers offer many benefits to the student body, faculty, and the university as a whole. 

What I’ve done here is prepare my audience (the reader) for my paper. I’ve told my reader what my paper will be about and what to expect. But I’ve also obligated myself to fulfill this promise. By making this promise to the reader, I hold myself accountable to write my paper in a way that fulfills the reader’s expectations. 

Keeping my thesis in mind helps me stay focused when I write my paper. In my thesis statement, I claim that a university writing center is beneficial for students, faculty, and the whole university, so I need to make sure I address all three of my claims in the paper. One way I could to do this is by developing a paragraph for each topic: how the university writing center benefits students, how it benefits faculty, and how it benefits the entire university. By doing this, my thesis is supported by the body of my essay, and I fulfill my promise to the reader. 

Once you understand what a thesis statement is, you can better understand its mini-me, the topic sentence. The topic sentence does for the paragraph what the thesis statement does for the essay. So, for my paper on the benefits of a university writing center my topic sentence for the first body paragraph might be:

Students in all majors and disciplines and at any level of writing confidence can benefit by visiting the university’s writing center. 

This topic sentence tells my reader that this paragraph is about the ways in which students benefit from university writing centers. As writers, what we are trying to say might make sense in our head, or even when we read our paper, but it’s important to remember that our readers might need a little direction. By developing a clear thesis statement and topic sentences, we help readers understand where the paper is going, much like road signs help us navigate the road. 

For more tips on writing a thesis statement, check out the Purdue Online Writing Lab.

-Tessa

Advice from Michael: Finding Structure and Logic

In the last few months, I’ve had several people come in looking for help with structuring their essays and creating a logical flow in their argument. Personally, this is something that I have struggled with in the past, and there are a few little tricks that helped me.

First off, try to give yourself enough time to write the paper. If you try to cram it the night before, or the day of, then you’ll just end up with a jumbled up mess that is the product of sleep deprivation. For myself, I usually end up like this:

Source

 Once you’ve allotted enough time to actually work on your essay, you can then begin to make use of some simple little tricks. Most important of these tricks is to understand the importance of the thesis statement. Your thesis statement is your paper. In it, you outline the entire argument and structure your entire essay. Everything else is based around this single little sentence. Each thesis should proclaim the overall claim of the paper, and then follow up with the three main points that you want to make in support of the claim. Those three points are your arguments for the claim you are making.

Next, you create your three body paragraphs based on these three points. Each paragraph should focus on one of these points, although these paragraphs could also reference previous paragraphs and points. Keeping this in mind, you should order these paragraphs so that they build off of each other instead of standing alone in the crowd. Finally, you conclude everything in the final paragraph without adding any new information, and don’t forget to reiterate the thesis statement. Of course, I have to clarify that more advanced essays require more complex structures than this simple three paragraph style. The basic principle is still the same, however, and a good thesis will still determine and guide the development of the entire essay.

As for the logical flow of the essay, the only advice I can offer is to think about it. Does it really make sense? Does your argument actually have any real pertinence to the claim you are making? If not, then feel free to change it and rewrite it. Yes, this sometimes means having to start from scratch after writing a few pages, but that is all a part of the writing process. A good way to avoid this is simply brainstorming and outlining before you begin writing. Don’t forget that while you are writing to always check to see if what you are saying matches up with the thesis.

In order to avoid having a Fry moment, be sure to give yourself plenty of time to work on the essay, think about what your arguments are carefully, and structure the essay around the almighty thesis statement. These simple little tricks should be adequate in helping you provide structure and logic to your paper.

-Michael