Tackling the Dreaded Thesis Statement

One of the most common questions that I get as a Writing Consultant at Defiance College is: What is a thesis statement? Here is the answer that I have come up with...

The thesis statement of your paper is the one sentence that tells the audience EXACTLY what your paper is going to be about. It sums up the entire point of the paper. The rest of the paper should contain evidence (and summary) that supports the claim that you are making in the thesis statement.

The advice that I give to those who are really struggling with developing a concrete thesis statement is to write an "I believe that..." statement and then delete the words "I," "believe" and "that," leaving the rest of the sentence. In my experience, I have seen this piece of advice work about 98% of the time. The directions are easy to follow and can be used for any type of essay. The only problem that I have experienced with this strategy is needing to alter the beginning of the sentence after taking away the "I believe that" in order to have the sentence make sense.

Let me give you an example:

Prompt- Write a critique essay on one of the characters in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

Steps to follow:

1. Pick a character to focus on. 
• Kate
2. Take your stance on that character. 
• Kate is fake because she is only pretending to be tamed at the end of the play
3. Develop your "I believe that" statement. 
• I believe that Kate is only pretending to be tamed at the end of William Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew, which causes her character to come across as insincere.
4. Now, take away the "I believe that" and see what you have left.
• Kate is only pretending to be tamed at the end of William Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew, which makes her character to come across as insincere.

Looks good! The order of the sentence can be changed around but all of the pieces are there. You do not necessarily need to mention the title and author of whatever you are writing about in your thesis statement but it should be mentioned somewhere in the introduction of your essay in order to make sure that the audience knows who and what you are talking about. (If you are having trouble with keeping your audience in mind, keep your eye out for my audience awareness post!)