Thesis Statements

Tips for Writing Your Thesis Statement

1. Determine what kind of paper you are writing:

• An analytical paper breaks down an issue or an idea into its component parts, evaluates the issue or idea, and presents this breakdown and evaluation to the audience.
• An expository (explanatory) paper explains something to the audience.
• An argumentative paper makes a claim about a topic and justifies this claim with specific evidence. The claim could be an opinion, a policy proposal, an evaluation, a cause-and-effect statement, or an interpretation. The goal of the argumentative paper is to convince the audience that the claim is true based on the evidence provided.

If you are writing a text that does not fall under these three categories (e.g., a narrative), a thesis statement somewhere in the first paragraph could still be helpful to your reader.

2. Your thesis statement should be specific—it should cover only what you will discuss in your paper and should be supported with specific evidence. It should be well-qualified, which means it should give limits to what it is talking about. Time frames, specific places and people, and other necessary qualifying adjectives should be added to your thesis statement.
3. The thesis statement usually appears at the end of the first paragraph of a paper. It is usually 1-2 sentences long.
4. Your topic may change as you write, so you may need to revise your thesis statement to reflect exactly what you have discussed in the paper.

Thesis Statement for Essay #1 

Your first fairy tales essay in this class is an analysis paper.  You are analyzing how the differences between two versions of one fairy tale demonstrate a specific cultural shift.

Examples (do not copy these for your paper or you are plagiarizing)

Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid compared to Disney's version of the 1990s reveals a cultural shift toward upward mobility and the promise of the American Dream. Anderson's mermaid suffers immensely for her new life and still does not get her dream in the end, much as people during that time could not move out of their social station. 

The Brother's Grimms' Little Red Cap is rescued by a man (the huntsman), whereas Angela Carter's Little Red rescues herself, demonstrating a cultural shift in the 1960s and 1970s toward a more feminist, empowered perspective.