In many cases, the success of your paper will hinge on your ability to produce a coherent thesis statement. If you can crack the thesis statement, nothing will stop you from completing the rest of your paper.
A thesis statement, for those who don’t know, is a sentence that attempts to outline the primary components of your assignment. Every paper is designed to put a particular message across.
The arguments you make within your paper have to support that message. The thesis statement lays out the main idea of your paper and the position you have taken.
In other words, you’re not simply stating the topic of the assignment. You are also presenting the conclusion you reached on the topic.
Good Thesis Statement Writing
You cannot get the thesis statement wrong. You need it to give your assignment direction and to give you focus. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to suggest that a thesis statement is the most important sentence in your assignment. And if you need help getting it right, consider the following tips:
1). Knowledge
You need to make sure that you actually know what you’re talking about. You cannot hope to write a paper on a topic you do not understand. However, it is even more difficult to produce a good thesis statement on a topic you don’t understand.
As such, you need to get as familiar with your topic as possible. Try to remember that a thesis is presenting the opinion you have taken on the topic. If you haven’t understood the topic in question, you can’t form an opinion, which means that you can’t write a thesis statement.
There is a reason why so many professors emphasize the importance of research. The more you know, the easier it will be to craft your thesis statement.
2). Scope
A good thesis statement is supposed to help you confine your topic to a particular area. So you need to limit your topic before you sit down to write the statement.
The thesis statement shouldn’t be too general. Limit it to the focal point of your assignment. Make sure that you are getting to the meat of the subject you want to explore in the body.
Assignments that merely skim the surface rarely attract praise. And you can tell that a paper is too general by looking at the thesis statement. Be as specific as possible.
3). Questions
It is easy to command a student to narrow their focus and limit their topic. But the execution of that advice is quite difficult. If you are struggling to produce a coherent statement, start asking questions.
Take a broad look at your topic and try to generate as many questions from it as you can. In trying to answer those questions, you are going to find a particular angle within your topic that will pique your interest, an angle that you can use as the focus of your thesis statement.
4). Revision
You won’t get your thesis right on the first go. Rather, you will keep refining it until it takes a shape you think is appropriate. Even if you get the thesis statement right on your very first try, revisions will still be necessary. And this is where a look from the outside is needed, order a paper with one free revision from Copycrafter and the problem is fixed.
Once you start writing your paper, your ideas are going to change. You are going to stumble upon new sources that will challenge your arguments. And once your arguments change, you must remember to change your thesis statement as well.
A good thesis statement should evolve with your paper. Do not presume that once you get the statement right, it has to remain unchanged. Such an inflexible mindset will compromise your paper because you will reject any arguments down the line that contradict the ideas presented in the thesis statement.
And a statement that traps your arguments in a particular lane is dangerous. You need to be flexible. Accept that revisions are an essential component of a good thesis statement.
5). Originality
People who study the papers of other academics in an effort to master the process of thesis writing have a tendency to adhere very closely to the formulas and structures previous thesis writers utilized.
But when it comes to thesis statements, do not stick too closely to the formulas and generic arguments you have read in books or on the internet. A good thesis statement must be original.
You can use formulas to make your first few drafts. But over time, you have to refine your statement to ensure that it reflects your unique outlook on the topic, not the ideas that your predecessors already presented in theirs.
