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Writer's Studio

Creating a Thesis

After generating ideas, the next step is forming your paper's thesis. Despite the fact that a paper should follow the assignment if the paper is being written in the academic setting, sometimes professors do not spell out exactly what should be done or discussed in a paper. In these cases where there is a lot of room for invention, it is sometimes hard to narrow the information into a good thesis. This section will explain what constitutes a good thesis (concept) and pointers on how to focus your thoughts to develop one.

The Nature of a Good Thesis (concept)

You may have found yourself in the past writing papers that have theses that begin like "In this paper I will discuss," "I am going to write about, " or "This paper will talk about." These are not good theses because they tend to introduce a paper that is simply a compilation of information. A good thesis is an unique concept which makes a claim about something's relationships with something else and needs demonstration.

For example, suppose you are in a psychology class where you are discussing several mental disorders. You are assigned to choose one and write about; you choose schizophrenia. There are several things you can write about, so you begin brainstorming. You come up with a list of several things. Now you need to focus, or state your beginning thesis. At this point, you could fall into a common writing trap: you decide to write about everything and your paper is just a assembling of information about schizophrenia. Beware of this because this hardly ever leads to good writing. Like we said earlier, what we want is an original concept as a thesis.

You realize this, but are still confused on how to begin narrowing your thoughts about schizophrenia. Here are some basic steps on how to begin:

  1. You must make sure that what you say accurately fulfills the assignment. In the example, the assignment is so broad that the writer is left to his own devices to narrow the topic; but this is not always true, so check your assignment first.
  2. Take your main subject of discussion and choose a specific aspect of it, relate it to another like subject, find the relationship between it and something that interests you that has to do with it, or any other way you can think of to narrow the topic. Let's narrow our topic to schizophrenia and children.
  3. Now you need to say something about that relationship to determine your final thesis. Let's narrow our example: Abusive parents can cause schizophrenia in children.

This beginning thesis is controversial and requires proof to overturn opposing opinions. Therefore, it indicates directly what the paper will discuss.

Verbs are often the words that name relationships in a concept. The relationship may be very general, such as "A differs from B," "A and B belongs to category C," "A contradicts B," "A prevents B and C," "A and B combined lead to C," etc. Your final thesis or concept of a paper should directly state the relationship. The relationship should be specific enough to indicate the development required.

The second defining characteristic of a concept is that it is not something that is already known or almost exclusively agreed upon. In order for it to be a good thesis, it must be clear and, at the very least, add something original to the discussion of the topic--most of the time this simply means writing your opinions, with support, about your topic.

Remember: it is OK to change your thesis in the middle of writing. Sometimes you will discover that what it says is not what you really meant. Change at your own discretion, but remember it still should have the same characteristics as what we described above.