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Thesis Your thesis is the basic stand you take, the opinion you express, the point you make about your limited subject. It's your controlling idea, tying together and giving direction to all of the separate elements in your paper. Your primary purpose is to persuade the reader that your thesis is a valid one. You may, and probably should, have secondary purposes; you may want to amuse or alarm or inform or issue a call to action, for instance--but unless the primary purpose is achieved, no secondary purpose stands a chance. If you want to amuse your readers by making fun of inconsistent dress codes at your old high school, there's no way to do it successfully without first convincing them of the validity of your thesis that the dress codes were inconsistent and thus do deserve to be laughed at. A thesis is only a vibration in the brain until it is turned into words. The first step in creating a workable thesis is to write a one-sentence version of the thesis, which is called a thesis statement, for example:
Writing with a thesis gives a paper a sense of purpose and eliminates the problem of aimless drift. Your purpose is to back up the thesis. As a result, writing with a thesis also helps significantly in organizing the paper. You use only what enables you to accomplish your purpose. Weight problems and religion have nothing to do with Professor X's abilities as a teacher, so you don't bother with them. Most of all, writing with a thesis gives a paper an intrinsic dramatic interest. You commit yourself. You have something at stake: "this is what I believe, and this is why I'm right." You say, "Professor X is incompetent." Your reader says, "Tell me why you think so." You say, "I'll be glad to "Your reader says, "I'm listening." And you're ready to roll. So far, then, we've established that a thesis is the main idea that all elements in the paper should support and that you should be able to express it in a single sentence. We've published that a thesis has several important practical benefits. That's the bird's-view, but the concept is important enough to demand a closer look. What a Thesis Isn't
A title can often give the reader some notion of what the thesis is going to be, but it is not the thesis itself. The thesis itself, as presented in the thesis statement, does not suggest the main idea--it is the main idea. Remember, too, that a thesis statement will always be a complete sentence; there's no other way to make a statement.
A thesis takes a stand. It expresses an attitude toward the subject. It is not the subject itself.
A thesis makes a judgment or interpretation. There's no way to spend a whole paper supporting a statement that needs no support. Fact: Not a Thesis Jane Austen is the author of Pride and Prejudice. The capital of California is Sacramento. Suicide is the deliberate taking of one's own life. President Lincoln's first name was Abraham. The planet closest to the Sun is Mercury.
A thesis is your main idea, often expressed in a single sentence. Be careful not to confuse the term as it is used in this text with the book-length thesis or dissertation required of candidates for advanced degrees in graduate schools. What a Good Thesis Is It's possible to have a one-sentence statement of an idea and still not have a thesis that can be supported effectively. What characterizes a good thesis? A Good Thesis Is Restricted Devising a thesis statement as you plan your paper can be a way in itself of limiting, or restricting, your subject even further. A paper supporting the thesis the Professor X is incompetent, besides taking a stand on its subject, has far less territory to cover than a paper on Professor X in general. Thesis statements themselves, however, may not always be sufficiently narrow. A good thesis deals with restricted, bite-size issues rather than issues that would require a lifetime to discuss intelligently. The more restricted the thesis, the better the chances are for supporting it fully.
A Good Thesis is Unified The thesis expresses one major idea about its subject. The tight structure of your paper depends on its working to support that one idea. A good thesis may sometimes include a secondary idea if it is strictly subordinated to the major one, but without that subordination the writer will have too many important ideas to handle, and the structure of the paper will suffer.
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