The thesis statement

A topic is something you want to talk about: the environment, or censorship of the arts, or wealth and poverty in America. A thesis, by contrast, is an argument, generally reduced down to one sentence. Many students think that all they have to do to get an essay off the ground is state the topic. For instance: A key issue in America today is wealth and poverty. But that is not enough. Two essays can have the same topic but make opposite arguments （the thesis statements are italicized）:

Topic: wealth and poverty in America
ARGUMENT 1 ARGUMENT 2
A key issue in America today is wealth and poverty. Despite the immense differences between how the wealthiest and poorest Americans live, American culture is not marked by rigid, long-standing class divisions. Through hard work, millions of Americans who were born poor have been able to achieve prosperity for themselves and their families. America today is the most economically mobile country in the world.
A key issue in America today is wealth and poverty. Over the last twenty years, rich Americans have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. At the same time, the poor have been increasingly blamed and abandoned by the rest of society. Once we tried to help poor Americans up; today, though we are richer than ever before, we blame the poor for their poverty and enact policies that will keep them poor.

　　A strong thesis makes writing the whole essay easier, because it helps you see how the whole argument should be organized. Yet again and again students turn in essays with weak or absent or confusing theses. That's like starting a trip without a clear sense of where you're going. My advice to students is simple: Start with a good thesis, and build on it. Before you get too far in writing the essay, find the thesis statement in the introductory paragraph. Can't find it? Problem. Stop, think, and come up with one. And, as you write, constantly check what you're writing against your thesis sentence. Are you still on track? If not, what went wrong? Do you need to refocus your writing, or revise your thesis? Writing is one of the best ways to think, so don't be too convinced that the thesis you began with is the one you should end up with once you've written a draft of your essay.

　　Okay, how do you come up with a good thesis? First of all by remembering that a thesis should capture your whole argument in one sentence. Here is a thesis that doesn't work well, because the writer wasn't really thinking of it as a developed argument. And reading it, we are unsure of what the argument is:

　　In the Federalist papers, the authors play off of two aspects of human nature, conflict and imperfection.

　　This is one of those theses that sounds good at first but needs more work. What does play off of mean? And are conflict and imperfection simply two things the student's paper will discuss, or are they meant to be understood as connected in some fashion? This student succeeds in telling us what she will write about （her topic）, but she doesn't succeed in telling us what argument she's going to make.

　　Here is how the student ultimately revised her thesis, in a way that makes her argument clear:

　　The authors of the Federalist papers saw human nature as marked by conflict and fallibility.

　　Here is another example of an unclear or unformed thesis:

　　There is a common theme between Federalist essays #10 and #51: power.

　　All we have at this point is a topic. This writer has told us what she's going to write about, but not what her argument is. What do Federalist #10 and #51 say about power? Do they condemn or praise it? Do they propose to encourage or restrict power? Whose power are we talking about? And do these two Federalist papers make similar arguments about power, or do they merely share it as a topic? Here is one revision:

　　Federalist #10 and #51 both see conflict as the gravest danger to popular government. But instead of trying to eliminate conflict, they propose to harness its force.

　　What happened to power? The writer thought about her argument and decided that conflict was a more precise term for what she wanted to talk about.

　　Remember, your thesis is the most important sentence of the whole essay. It crystallizes your argument in a single statement.