Thesis Angles

Most writers can easily create a topic: squirrels in urban spaces, television viewing and young people, the Patriot Act and democracy, or tragedy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The more difficult part is creating an angle, or your major claim about a topic. The angle is necessary for your readers as a means of creating interest and indicating the type and organization of the information to follow. Remember that a basic thesis sentence has both a topic and an angle. The topic is what you’re writing about, but the angle covers the main idea of what you’re conveying about that topic.

For example, in the following thesis, the topic is exercise, and the angle is that it leads to benefits:

• A regular exercise regime leads to multiple physical and emotional benefits.

Let’s take a look at a thesis statement.

• College students have experiences.

As a reader, you understand intuitively that the writer will deal with the different types of experiences that adult college students may have. However, you may not know what is significant about this age group and why it matters. How can we be more specific about who we are writing about and what is interesting about the topic? Let’s take a look at a revision that is a bit more specific.

• College students over 30 have different work experiences that benefit their studies.

See the difference? We now have a specific topic (college students over 30) and a specific angle (their work experiences) along with why it matters (their work history will benefit their student skills). Realize that a thesis sentence offers a range of possibilities for specificity and organization. As a writer, you may opt to pique reader interest by being very specific or not fully specific in your thesis sentence. The point here is that there’s no one standard way to write a thesis sentence.

Sometimes a writer is more or less specific depending on the reading audience and the effect the writer wants to create. Sometimes a writer puts the angle first and the topic last in the sentence, or sometimes the angle is even implied. You need to gauge your reading audience and you need to understand your own style as a writer. The only basic requirements are that the thesis sentence needs a topic and an angle. The rest is up to you.

Thesis Creation

At what point do you write a thesis sentence? Of course, this varies from writer to writer and from writing assignment to writing assignment. You’ll usually do some preliminary idea development first, before a thesis idea emerges. And you’ll usually have a working thesis before you do the bulk of your research, or before you fully create the supporting details for your writing.

Think of the thesis as the mid-point of an hourglass.

You develop ideas for writing and prewriting, using various strategies, until a main idea or assertion emerges. This main idea or assertion becomes your point to prove—your working thesis sentence.

Once you have a working thesis sentence with your main idea, you can then develop more support for that idea, but in a more focused way that deepens your thinking about the thesis angle.

Realize that a thesis is really a working thesis until you finalize the writing. As you do more focused research, or develop more focused support, your thesis may change a bit. Just make sure that you retain the basic thesis characteristics of topic and angle.

Common Problems

Although you have creative control over your thesis sentence, you still should try to avoid the following problems, not for stylistic reasons, but because they indicate a problem in the thinking that underlies the thesis sentence.

Where to Place a Thesis?

For writers in the United States, it is customary for most academic writers to put the thesis sentence somewhere toward the start of the essay or research paper. The focus here is on offering the main results of your own thinking in your thesis angle and then providing evidence in the writing to support your thinking.

A legal comparison might help to understand thesis placement. If you have seen television shows or movies with courtroom scenes, the lawyer usually starts out by saying, “My client is innocent!” to set the scene, and then provides different types of evidence to support that argument. Academic writing in the United States is similar; your thesis sentence provides your main assertion to set the scene of the writing, and then the details and evidence in the rest of the writing support the assertion in the thesis sentence.

As a writer, you have the option of placing the thesis anywhere in the writing. For college assignments, you may be asked to make the thesis sentence idea clear to your readers. College writers usually stick with “thesis sentence toward the start,” as it makes the thesis prominent in the writing.