Tips for Writing Your Thesis Statement

1. Determine what type of paper you are writing:

  • An analytical paper breaks down an issue or an idea into its component parts, evaluates the issue or thought, and presents this breakdown and evaluation to the audience.
  • Expository (explanatory) papers explain something to the audience.
  • An argumentative paper makes a claim about a topic and justifies this claim with exact evidence. The claim could be an opinion, an evaluation, a policy proposal, a cause-and-effect statement, or an interpretation. The aim of the argumentative paper is to convince the audience that the claim is true based on the evidence provided.
If you are writing a text which does not fall under these three categories (ex. a narrative), a thesis statement somewhere in the first paragraph could still be useful to your reader.

2. Your thesis statement should be specific—it should cover only what you will discuss in your paper and should be supported with exact evidence.

3. The thesis statement normally appears at the end of the first paragraph of a paper.

4. Your topic may alter as you write, so you may need to revise your thesis statement to reflect exactly what you have discussed in the paper.

Comments

  1. AnonymousApril 2, 2010 at 11:30 PM

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