Whether you are writing a short essay or a doctoral dissertation, your thesis statement will be arguably the most complex part to formulate. An effective thesis statement states the purpose of the paper and, therefore, functions to control, assert, and structure your entire argument. Without a sound thesis stated clearly at the beginning of your paper, your writing will sound unfocused, and uninteresting to the reader.

Most college-level writing is analytical, valuing a thesis that arises from close attention to the significance of patterns of evidence that are not stated explicitly. Think of analysis as “value added” reading where you need to move beyond comprehending and summarizing what the text explicitly states.

Start with a question—then make the answer your thesis

Regardless of how complicated the subject is, almost any thesis can be constructed by answering a question. This question-and-answer format encourages you to formulate a claim about a topic, rather than just announcing that a topic exists. An academic thesis must be something that can be argued (and argued against), which means it can’t simply be a statement of fact, or lack any contestable claim.

• Question: “What are the benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade classroom?”
  • Thesis: “Computers allow fourth graders an early advantage in technological and scientific education.”
• Question: “Why is the Mississippi River so important in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn?”
  • Thesis: “The Mississippi River comes to symbolize both division and progress, as it separates the characters and country while still providing the best chance for Huck and Jim to get to know one another.”
• Question: “Why do people seem to get angry at vegans, feminists, and other ‘morally righteous’ subgroups?”
  • Thesis: “Through careful sociological study, we’ve found that people frequently assume that ‘morally righteous’ people look down on them as ‘inferior,’ causing anger and conflict where there generally is none.”

Ensure your thesis is provable

Don’t get wedded to your draft thesis! The thesis is the end point of your research: you often begin with some sense of your thesis, but you need to be prepared to nuance, alter, or abandon that thesis if your evidence suggests a different answer to the question that prompted your thesis in the first place. A thesis ultimately emerges from your evidence, so an academic thesis is one you must be able to back up with evidence.

Examples of Good Theses:

Note that because a thesis and an introduction form one structural unit, these thesis statements are only part of what each author would need to write to introduce an argument.

• “By owning up to the impossible contradictions within ‘experienced innocence,’ embracing religious paradox and structuring multiple poems around oxymorons found in the natural world, William Blake forges his own faith, and is stronger for it. Ultimately, the only way for his poems to encourage faith is to temporarily lose it.”
• “Although many working people with autism find flexible employment instructions difficult to manage, and they often struggle with social subtleties or even with the everyday office-life annoyances of fluorescent lights and ringing phones, employers should reconceptualize the disability status of those with an autism spectrum disorder to realize the workplace benefits of hyperfocus and reliability.”

Bad Theses Examples:

• “The wrong people won the American Revolution.” While striking and unique, the claim about who is “right” and who is “wrong” is exceptionally hard to prove, and very subjective.
• “The theory of genetic inheritance is the binding theory of every human interaction.” Too complicated and overzealous. The scope of “every human interaction” is just too big. “The binding theory” is too absolute. This desire to make a sweeping claim is a very common symptom of a thesis that’s headed for trouble, since the writer can’t possibly live up to the promise of that scope in 5-10 pages and will either collapse into banal generalizations or fail to present a coherent body of evidence (is there anything that wouldn’t count as evidence of “every human interaction”?!?). The good news is that no one expects you to explain the universe in your first year at college; demonstrate instead that you can argue a manageable point well. 
• “Paul Harding’s novel Tinkers is ultimately a cry for help from a clearly depressed author.” Unless you interviewed Harding extensively, or had a lot of real-life sources, you have no way of proving what is fact and what is fiction.

This ed.ted.com video on thesis statements makes a useful point about topic, claim, and major points as elements of a thesis, although the necessary generalizing results in thesis statements that lack the complexity expected from college-level writers. Notice how the major points are listed and the claims aren’t very sophisticated: that’s a function of trying to explain thesis statements to a general audience in under two minutes, but the principles of doing more than simply announcing a topic or asserting an opinion are illustrated usefully.

Get the sound right

You want your thesis statement to be identifiable as a thesis statement. You signal its centrality by using logical words like “because,” “by,” or “therefore”; signal its complexity with logic like “although” or “however”; and signal your right to contribute to the scholarly conversation surrounding your topic by taking a confident, measured tone. The evidence from which your thesis emerges will prove your claim, so it’s okay to sound confident about what you’re saying. However, every thesis should be open to other perspectives (otherwise, if no one could disagree, there’d be no real motivation to write), so you don’t want to sound as if only a fool could possibly think anything other than what you are telling them is true; e.g., “All store owners always argue against any legislation regarding hours of business because of the supreme importance merchants place on profits.” Those absolute terms like “all,” “always,” “any,” and “supreme” are too assertive, sounding like bluster rather than confidence. Watch out for such intensifiers.

Example thesis statements with confident, logical, but not blustering statement language include:

• “Because William the Conqueror’s campaign into England initiated Anglo-Norman intermarriage, that nation developed the elite cosmopolitan culture it would need to eventually build the British Empire.”
• “Hemingway challenged the self-satisfied elitism of literature by normalizing simplistic writing and frank tone. However, his deliberate cultivation of short, declarative sentences became its own exclusionary literary standard.”

Know where to place a thesis statement

Because of the role thesis statements play, they appear at the beginning of the paper. Although many people look for the thesis at the end of the first paragraph, its location can depend on a number of factors such as how much background you need before you can introduce your thesis, or the length of your paper. More importantly, since your thesis drives your essay, nothing at all in the introduction should be—or seem—irrelevant to it. You might be able to identify one particular sentence as the most concise statement of your thesis, but even the way you present background information should be framed by the particular thesis you want that background to support. Avoid starting your paper with what sound like decontextualized facts (“An electrode is a conductor through which electricity enters or leaves an electrolyte, gas, or vacuum”) or sweeping generalizations (“Throughout history, Americans. . . “) as if you need to clear your throat before you introduce the point of your paper. Readers are more likely to tolerate the definition of an electrode if they already have the context of a thesis like “Although the automative industry has relied for decades on electrodes to keep drivers safe, . . . ” Now your readers will want to know what an electrode is because they know it has something to do with their safety when they get into a car (which they care about, even if they don’t yet know that they care about developments in the automotive industry), and because the logic signaled by “although” lets them already know that your thesis is going to build from an understanding of electrodes as the starting point to the significance of something new.