Thesis statement
I’ve been asked how to craft a thesis statement. Here are some point to think about when considering your thesis statement:
- a thesis is not a statement of fact
- a thesis is not a description of the topic
- a thesis is not an opinion
What a thesis is
- a statement that reflects the conclusions the author has reached about the topic under consideration in the paper
- an arguable/debatable point
- the central point of the paper
Consider the following examples, taken from Mary Rampolla’s The Pocket Guide to Writing in History:
A student is asked to write a paper on Samuel George Morton, a nineteenth-century physician and scientist who specialized on the human skull and wrote several treatises on craniometry. In his first draft he has the following thesis statement:
Morton measured the size and shape of human skulls from various racial and ethnic groups, concluding that Caucasians had the largest skulls and where therefore superior to all other races.
The sentence above is not a thesis since it merely describes Morton’s work. Notice the difference:
Morton and his contemporaries used his skull studies, which he said were objective and quantitative, to justify their belief in the superiority of the Caucasian race; however, a close examination of Morton’s work reveals, as Stephen Jay Gould has suggested, that his supposedly scientific data were created by his own prejudices and racism.
This statement, as you can see, not only indicates what Morton and his contemporaries claimed but also what the writer of the paper has concluded after careful investigation.
Consider, also, that a thesis should be arguable. This means that two people could look at the same source and come up with very different arguments about it. For example, when asked to compare the views of the late-medieval philosopher Nicole Oresme and Galileo Galilei on the whole of religion in their views of the natural work, one student might want to focus on the similarities of their ideas, arguing that:
Popular descriptions of Galileo imply that he believed science and religion were incompatible, but a comparison of his ideas with those of Nicole Oresme suggests that Galileo’s ideas about God and nature were similar to the beliefs held by medieval natural philosophers.
While another student might want to focus on the distinctions:
Both Galileo and Oresme believe in God, but the similarities end there: While Oresme sees Scripture as the ultimate font of all knowledge, Galileo dismisses it as irrelevant to the issues explored by scientists.
Both theses are equally valid as long as they are well demonstrated in the essay.
But don’t fret too much about trying to come up with the perfect thesis statement. Consider first what your want your essay to be able and what is the main point of it. Once you figure out your main point, the thesis will be there.
March 04 2010 09:35 pm | assignments