Plan B writing strategies at Grenfell: What the heck is a thesis statement?

One of the ways Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland, helps its students improve their academic skills is through free coaching at the Learning Centre. When at first they don’t succeed, first-year students often find themselves asking for help with one of their greatest hurdles: the essay.

Many students are surprised to discover that sentences, paragraphs, and frequent trips to a thesaurus do not make an effective essay. The foundation of the essay is simply the argument you are trying to make. And while things like sentence and paragraph structure, not to mention related grammatical and punctuation issues, continue to haunt students, these problems are secondary to the actual points students are trying to argue. Polished prose makes the work more appealing, but the real foundation is the argument itself – the thesis statement.

A thesis statement is a premise for an argument that requires proof. The reader is forced to think: “That can’t be true. Prove it!” That proof and its analysis provide the structure for the rest of your essay, guiding it in a logical manner. In the end, it simply doesn’t matter how well each sentence is written if you have nothing to say. So make a claim! And stand up for yourself by providing proof for that claim! Without the ‘glue’ of some conceptual argument, your essay will have no structure.