A thesis statement manages to encapsulate an essay's main argument in a succinct, one-sentence comment. Beginner writers often times find it useful to create an essay map thesis, where the thesis briefly lists the areas that will be discussed in the essay. Attention Getters & Lead-ins Question: How is this a graphical representation of an introduction Paragraph? A Thesis Statement: Ways writers can begin: Suppose you are taking a course on 19th-century America, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment: Compare and contrast the reasons why the North and South fought the Civil War. You turn on the computer and type out the following: This handout describes what a thesis statement is, how thesis statements work in your writing, and how you can craft or refine one for your draft. Through its contrasting river and shore scenes help writing a thesis statement, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must leave “civilized” society and go back to nature. Now you have a working thesis! Included in this working thesis is a reason for the war and some idea of how the two sides disagreed over this reason. As you write the essay, you will probably begin to characterize these differences more precisely, and your working thesis may start to seem too vague. Maybe you decide that both sides fought for moral reasons, and that they just focused on different moral issues. You end up revising the working thesis into a final thesis that really captures the argument in your paper: Here’s a working thesis with potential: you have highlighted an important aspect of the novel for investigation. However, it’s still not clear what your analysis will reveal. Your reader is intrigued but is still thinking, “So what? What’s the point of this contrast? What does it signify?” Perhaps you are not sure yet writing theoretical essay, either. That’s fine—begin to work on comparing scenes from the book and see what you discover. Free write, make lists, jot down Huck’s actions and reactions. Eventually you will be able to clarify for yourself, and then for the reader, why this contrast matters. After examining the evidence and considering your own insights, you write: The North and South fought the Civil War for many reasons do you write essays in first person, some of which were the same and some different. In Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore. If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt who can edit my essay, ask your instructor if the assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze essay about family importance, to interpret, to compare and contrast, to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout on understanding assignments for more information.) Why is this thesis weak? Think about what the reader would expect from the essay that follows: most likely a general, appreciative summary of Twain’s novel. But the question did not ask you to summarize; it asked you to analyze. Your professor is probably not interested in your opinion of the novel; instead, she wants you to think about why it’s such a great novel—what do Huck’s adventures tell us about life, about America, about coming of age, about race, etc. First, the question asks you to pick an aspect of the novel that you think is important to its structure or meaning—for example, the role of storytelling, the contrasting scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships between adults and children. Though it is a sad truth, most people in the U.S. willingly spend their hard-earned cash by investing in retarded technology. In Robert Samuelson's essay, "Technology in Reverse", he claims that certain inventions in our modern world are "retarded." They are not retarded in the conventional sense we think of to describe humans who are genetically challenged, like people with Downs Syndrome. Instead, Samuelson uses the term "retarded" in a more literal sense to mean that an invention has not evolved beyond the one it is replacing. He claims that "retarded technology creates new and expensive ways of doing things that were once done simply and inexpensively" (124). Samuelson is correct in his observation that our world is inundated with retarded technology. In addition to the examples he points out in his 1992 essay, other examples of "technology racing backwards" (125) have been invented in the last 10 years. You will want to start off every essay with a well developed introductory paragraph. Remember the criteria we discussed a couple classes ago on the structure of a well-written essay. To achieve it's function education websites, the introductory paragraph must hook the reader (or engage her in some way); it must establish the subject matter; it should convey the purpose of the essay; and it should introduce the thesis statement in the very last sentence of the paragraph. For the essay assignment you will be writing, you will need to write a declarative thesis. This is a thesis that you can prove or support with clear, concrete examples. Unlike the "soft" controlling idea s that you might have been taught to use in a narrative/description essay, this exemplification essay will contain a thesis statement that asserts a main claim that you'll need to develop or prove with multiple paragraphs throughout your essay. Consider the following introductory paragraph example that contains the thesis statement in red: You might be wondering what makes a good thesis statement. First it must be very precise. Words are carefully chosen (this is called diction ) to convey the essay's main point clearly. Because the thesis is the most important sentence in the entire essay different styles in essay writing, you want to spend some time on it essay writing types of essays, honing it, carving it out so that its diction is sharp, piercing. The one above is a generalized thesis because it does not map out the 4 forms of retarded technology (remember the class lecture about mapped versus generalized thesis statements). You can use either a mapped thesis or a generalized thesis in your exemplification essay. 1 Further on in the story, Poe uses a couple of words that cross not only the sense of sight but also the sense of feeling to describe a dynamic scene. 2 The youth in the story has been standing in the open doorway of the old man's room for a long time, waiting for just the right moment to reveal himself to the old man in order to frighten him. 3 Poe writes: "So I opened it [the lantern opening]--you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily--until, at length, a single dim ray pay to write an essay, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye." 4 By using the metaphor of the thread of the spider (which we all know is a creepy creature) and the word "shot," Poe almost makes the reader gasp, as surely did the old man whose one blind eye the young man describes as "the vulture eye." 1 The reader does not know much about what the old man in this story looks like except that he has one blind eye. 2 In the second paragraph of "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe establishes the young man's obsession with that blind eye when he writes: "He had the eye of the vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it." 3 This "vulture eye" is evoked over and over again in the story until the reader becomes as obsessed with it as does the young man. 4 His use of the vivid, concrete word "vulture" establishes a specific image in the mind of the reader that is inescapable. A classic format for compositions is the five-paragraph essay. It is not the only format for writing an essay, of course, but it is a useful model for you to keep in mind, especially as you begin to develop your composition skills. The following material is adapted from a handout prepared by Harry Livermore for his high school English classes at Cook High School in Adel, Georgia. It is used here with his permission. In the first sentence of the second paragraph (first paragraph of the body) the words "sense" and "manipulation" are used to hook into the end of the introductory paragraph. The first part of the second sentence provides the topic for this paragraph--imagery in a static scene. Then a quotation from "The Tell-Tale Heart" is presented and briefly discussed. The last sentence of this paragraph uses the expressions "sense of feeling" and "sense of sight" as hooks for leading into the third paragraph. The second paragraph of the body should contain the second strongest argument, second most significant example, second cleverest illustration, or an obvious follow up the first paragraph in the body. The first sentence of this paragraph should include the reverse hook which ties in with the transitional hook at the end of the first paragraph of the body. The topic for this paragraph should be in the first or second sentence. This topic should relate to the thesis statement in the introductory paragraph. The last sentence in this paragraph should include a transitional hook to tie into the third paragraph of the body.
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