Focusing Your Academic Essay: Writing a Strong Thesis Statement

Whether you are writing an essay, a poem, a story, or a novel, you need to retain a clear conception of your point of focus.  While you may meander into examples, counterpoints, metaphors, or expository flurries, disciplined attachment to a single focal point keeps the writer honest and the reader anchored.  In an academic essay, the thesis statement comprises that point.  The writer will make many points in an essay, but all of them should serve to strengthen the main argument or position of the essay, as laid out in the thesis statement.  The thesis should never be compound, a cop-out that attempts to make two primary arguments.  It is the equivalent to a football team having two starting quarterbacks; it suggests to readers that the writer does not have a single idea strong enough to emerge.  It may well be complex, though, so long as any qualifying phrases further define the idea, rather than merely limiting it.

Simple enough--but how do you write it?  The thesis is one sentence that, in as clear a direct manner as possible, delivers the point the writer is trying to make.  By the time I was in graduate school, this was the first sentence I would write in any essay.  I might go back and revise it after working through the rest of an essay, but the core point was always in place before I began so much as outlining the rest of the paper.

Many paths allow one to reach a well-honed thesis statement.  One is to take time to think about a text or group of texts, and focus on the single idea that, to you as writer, just matters most.  This works well if you are able to think clearly along a single path in the midst of a chaotic flurry of ideas.  Find the idea that attracts your attention, and craft a sentence providing the thrust of the argument you will make.

For others, the cacophony of ideas can cloud that line of vision.  If you find this to be the case, an outline or diagram of the ideas that occur to you may help build clarity from the chaos.  As you write down ideas, connect them to each other as appropriate, creating conceptual clusters that you can use to build a cohesive essay.  The overarching theme that connects the clusters becomes the thesis in this case.

Neither of these approaches is inherently "good" or "bad."  Indeed, a writer should banish those words--and indeed, the concepts themselves--from his or her vocabulary.  The best writers live in nuance, dabble in degrees.  And when it comes to writing techniques, the best is simply whatever allows a writer to deliver the clearest, most enjoyable result for his or her readers.