If you’ve taken a college-level writing course, chances are you’ve heard the term thesis. But do you have a good understanding of what one is and how it functions in your paper? I’m going to level with you—it wasn’t until I started teaching college-level writing (in my mid-thirties!) that I truly understood what a thesis is and what it is supposed to do in your paper.
And yet, all throughout college, and even graduate school, if professors complimented me on anything, it was my writing. In retrospect, I’ve always been an avid reader, and I think I had an intuitive sense of how writing was supposed to be structured, and what “sounded good” to my ear. And I was mostly able to get by on this intuition, except, of course, when I wasn’t—cue bad memories of getting a B- on my first graduate-school paper and having no idea why. At the time, my professor offered to meet with me to give me some feedback on my writing which I, of course, took her up on. The main thing I remember from that meeting was her telling me that it felt like I did a lot of “throat clearing” at the beginning of the paper, which she described as talking around the idea but never really getting to the point. I remember thinking: "All of my beautiful set-up? Where I introduced the idea intelligently and gave important background info?" I left that meeting understanding that I had "set-up" for too long but having no idea what to do instead! I wish she had mentioned the word “thesis!”
Now I know: if you want to be kind to readers and telegraph that you are not going to waste their time, you need a thesis.
In brief, a thesis is your central argument or insight about a topic. It needs to be interesting (you want someone to want to read your paper), it needs to be complex (if you can prove it in one paragraph, the idea isn’t complex enough to carry a whole paper), and it needs to be supported by the sources you’re working with (that is, it should rely on evidence from the sources you’re writing about, and your interpretation of them).
Once I started to teach writing, I realized the wealth of information that exists on how to write academic or expository essays. No one need labor in the dark the way I did. For more information on what a thesis is, and how to write one, two of my favorite books on academic writing are: They Say/I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein and The Imaginative Argument by Frank Cioffi.
If you’re struggling to articulate your thesis, don’t be afraid to use really obvious language as you’re drafting your paper. By "really obvious," I mean: “I argue in this paper that XYZ… ” kind-of-obvious. You can always use this language as a fill-in-the-blank writing prompt of sorts to jog your brain into generating an argument and then take it out later (just delete the "signpost" phrase and go right into the argument). Or, you can leave in the signpost. As a professor reading 30-45 versions of the same paper, I often appreciated students’ efforts to write clearly more than anything else about their writing--including their originality. Striving to write clearly doesn't sound as sexy or intellectual as striving to write a stellar argument, but one way to think about this is that it almost doesn't matter how great your argument is if the writing isn't very clear and the professor is going to miss your intended meaning. You can't go wrong by prioritizing clarity.
So, when writing an academic essay, remember: You need a thesis: a statement of what you aim to prove (or argue for) in your paper. Present your thesis early, ideally in the very first paragraph of your essay (no throat-clearing!). The paper that follows should demonstrate why the thesis is true; in other words, why the reader should get on board with your idea. If you get to the end of your first draft and you realize that the paper you’ve written doesn’t actually demonstrate your thesis (this happens often! We often need to write in order to figure out what we actually think and want to say), then go back and adjust your thesis so there is a match between the thesis statement and what your essay demonstrates.
For one last resource on thesis, check out this handout on thesis from The Harvard College Writing Center. I particularly like the questions they list at the end. You can use these as a test of sorts to see how strong your thesis argument is.
Happy writing!
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