IV. Draft your thesis statement.
Begin with a “working” thesis.
Your thesis statement is essentially going to be the main point of your entire essay: think of it like answering the prompt and summarizing your essay in one sentence.
Since this is the prewriting stage, though, don’t worry too much about getting the thesis perfect. You’ll edit it along the way, tweak it to better answer the prompt or to more closely reflect the content that you actually end up writing. But having a “working” thesis—one that lays out what you intend to write, while still being subject to later change—is one of the most effective strategies for getting started on an essay.
It’s often helpful to look at the ideas you’ve brainstormed and see if they’re guiding you in a certain direction—most often, they will be. Take the ideas you’re already thinking about using, and sum them up in one statement. Remember, don’t worry about making the statement clean or polished; you can always go back and change the thesis or your points later if you find yourself going in a different direction.
Keep brainstorming.
After you’ve given yourself a clear statement of what you’re trying to do with the essay, you’ll want to assess whether the main points you’ve brainstormed so far really fit with it. If you drew your thesis out of your brainstormed points, they probably will. If you need to tweak your points, keep on researching and keep on brainstorming!
Types of thesis statement:
Essays fall under two main categories, and your thesis statement will differ depending on what sort of essay you’re writing.
- Position Essays. These are the most common essays written in academia: the writer takes a position and develops an argument, using evidence and analysis to prove his or her point.
- Expository Essays. Less common: the writer gathers and presents information impartially, informing the reader or executing an exploration of the topic without taking an argumentative position.
From here, the most important thing will be to lay out, in a sentence or so, the main point I want to make with my essay. For me personally, the process of writing a thesis is closely involved with my outline—I do both and they help inform each other.
I’ll usually start with a placeholder statement that doesn’t have all the information filled in yet; something that says, I need to convince my reader that:
This image communicates its purpose of [whatever] using the methods [one] and [two] (and maybe [three] but I don’t know how many points I’ll have yet).
That first blank is easy to fill: the image’s purpose is to get non-Christian college students to attend this Christian event.
The other blanks, my brainstorming can start to fill: the ethos and pathos are certainly going to feature as main points in my essay.
But I know that my thesis statement is going to reflect the body paragraphs, and I haven’t decided yet whether I want ethos and pathos to be the central focus of those paragraphs, or whether they’re going to be the evidence for bigger points I want to be making.