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I'm posting this here more or less to save it for posterity: it's an explanation of how to write a thesis statement for a college-level class, which I wrote up for my students elsewhere. (I know it's not exactly a life update, but... I've been very busy!)
"thesis statement: noun. a short statement, usually one sentence, that summarizes the main point or claim of an essay, research paper, etc., and is developed, supported, and explained in the text by means of examples and evidence."
That's how dictionary.com defines the term. But definitions only take us so far, and sometimes it can be quite difficult to figure out what's required for a thesis statement in an academic paper. This is especially true if your area of academic focus is in an area that doesn't do a lot of persuasive writing as a core skill. It's an artificial style that can feel unfamiliar or awkward until you're used to it. But learning how to write a thesis statement, and then back it up with evidence, is useful for any kind of persuasive writing (and even talking) in many places outside of academia. Learning how to write a thesis is also an important part of this class!
So this is an explanation with more examples, to help get everyone from a statement in general, to a thesis statement that will work for the requirements of this class in particular.
To begin with, a thesis statement should be directly addressing whatever an essay (or email, or blog post, or speech, or video, any other form of communication where you want to persuade people to agree with you) is about. That means your thesis statement for the thesis assignments should be directly focused on the primary source(s) you're using, and be related to this class's topic in some way.
This is the part that most students find easiest. Most people will write a thesis statement that clearly references the assigned material.
For the sake of an example here, we're going to pretend that we have a class called "Women in European Fairy Tales," and we just had a week where we read the story "Little Red Riding Hood." I think most of you are familiar with the story, but if not, feel free to read a quick summary here, under "Original Version" and "Later Variant".
So for a thesis assignment that week, everyone would write a thesis that was clearly about the story "Little Red Riding Hood," and would probably focus on the girl or the grandmother (or both) in that story. That's our topic.
This is the main difference between a book report, and an essay on the same book: the essay is making a specific argument based on the book, while the book report is summarizing the book. Learning how to summarize something you've read is useful in many ways, so there's a reason it's often one of the first types of writing assignments you get in classes about reading! It's a way of showing that you understood the content of what you read, and can explain it clearly to someone else.
But an essay isn't a summary. An academic essay on a piece of literature should summarize only when necessary to explain something important to your argument. You can give very brief summaries of the whole piece when it's useful to you, but keep them short! An academic essay is making a claim about the text (or about something larger, using the text as a way to prove it), and the thesis statement should be explaining that claim.
So if you're writing a thesis statement based on Little Red Riding Hood, "This story is about a girl who takes a basket to her grandmother in the woods, but encounters danger from a wolf" isn't a thesis statement: it's just a summary.
Any statement that would appear on the back cover of a book, or in a summary of a play, or which is said explicitly in the text, or is a clear description of the text/art itself, is not a thesis statement. It's too obvious! You can't argue about obvious things, because no one would reasonable would disagree. "Little Red Riding Hood is a girl who wears a red hood" is not a thesis statement. "Little Red Riding Hood has the color of her clothing right in the title of the story because red symbolizes menstrual blood and the story is symbolic of her coming of age" may or may not be true, but now it's an argument the writer is making. That's a thesis statement.
If you could write and support your thesis statement based entirely on a summary of the primary source, then your thesis isn't deep enough yet. You need to go beyond the explicit and obvious to make an argument for something a little further below the surface.
One way teachers may help students learn how to write an essay is by assigning opinion writings. That's an assignment where you can choose any opinion you happen to have--"Chocolate is better than vanilla," "The Elder Rings is a brilliant video game franchise," "Picasso is an overrated artist," "There should be more laws protecting animals against human cruelty," "Julius Caesar was a bad man"--and argue in favor of your opinion.
This is a useful skill to learn, and probably one you have reason to use in your daily life. But the thesis for an academic paper needs to go beyond personal opinion. For some classes, "Little Red Riding Hood is an unsatisfying story because both the girl and her grandmother have to be saved by a man" would be a perfectly good thesis! But that kind of opinion isn't doing enough analysis to be a good thesis for an academic essay.
You can talk about aesthetic or moral effects of the text, especially in terms of what the text is trying to do, or what the author might have meant, or how the original audience received it, or what it tells us about how the society in which it was created thought about/valued various aesthetics and morals. But your own opinions of that sort--liking, disliking, thinking something is done well or badly, approving or disapproving of character (or historical figure) actions--shouldn't be part of the thesis. They're great to write about! But for other purposes than thesis assignments and papers in this kind of class.
When someone reads the first paragraph of an academic essay, you want them to think: "Oh, that's an interesting claim. I wonder how they'll prove it's true?" If you can give all the supporting evidence for your thesis--not just saying the points you'll be making, but all the actual evidence for them--in your first paragraph, you're probably not going deep enough.
"Our earliest written version of Little Red Riding Hood comes from Charles Perrault" might be a thesis statement if this was something people weren't sure about, and you were going to use a lot of historical evidence and citations of specific manuscripts, letters, and so forth to prove that he wrote the earliest version we have. But it's clearly not going to be analyzing the text of "Little Red Riding Hood" itself. However, "Little Red Riding Hood focuses on physical boundaries to show the hazards of transition states" might be a good academic thesis: you could analyze the implied and explicit locations of the story, show how the dangers attach to moving through or lingering in those transitional spaces and safety is associated with distance from those spaces, and so forth. That's the kind of thesis that clearly indicates you'll be looking deeply at the story ahead.
This isn't so much a definition as a practical aspect. The broader your thesis, the harder it is to support it sufficiently in a short paper: the narrower your thesis, the harder to fill a long paper with relevant analysis and explanation.
"The wolf in this story acts like a dangerous human man, not an actual wolf" is an argument you could support with reference to the story itself and examples from zoology articles on wolves plus sociology articles on "stranger danger" types of situations: but you'd prove your point so fast, it wouldn't be a very long paper. "The transitional spaces of Little Red Riding Hood are deeply unusual among all the fairy tales that Perrault recorded" would require looking at every single fairy tale that man recorded, and analyzing the transitional spaces of every single one: that would be a very long paper to support well!
Generally the broader and more general your thesis, the longer the paper it's suited for. The narrower and more specific your thesis, the shorter the paper it's suited for. Keep this in mind when picking theses for short papers versus your research paper.
Rather make you take a quiz on this, I'll just provide some examples of good and bad thesis statements. Note that this isn't about how easy or hard the statements would be to argue for: some of them are rather silly, and would be hard to argue convincingly. I'm trying to show you the difference between what a good thesis statement and a bad one looks like, regardless of how well it then gets supported.
What's a Thesis Statement?
"thesis statement: noun. a short statement, usually one sentence, that summarizes the main point or claim of an essay, research paper, etc., and is developed, supported, and explained in the text by means of examples and evidence."
That's how dictionary.com defines the term. But definitions only take us so far, and sometimes it can be quite difficult to figure out what's required for a thesis statement in an academic paper. This is especially true if your area of academic focus is in an area that doesn't do a lot of persuasive writing as a core skill. It's an artificial style that can feel unfamiliar or awkward until you're used to it. But learning how to write a thesis statement, and then back it up with evidence, is useful for any kind of persuasive writing (and even talking) in many places outside of academia. Learning how to write a thesis is also an important part of this class!
So this is an explanation with more examples, to help get everyone from a statement in general, to a thesis statement that will work for the requirements of this class in particular.
A Thesis Statement Is On Topic
To begin with, a thesis statement should be directly addressing whatever an essay (or email, or blog post, or speech, or video, any other form of communication where you want to persuade people to agree with you) is about. That means your thesis statement for the thesis assignments should be directly focused on the primary source(s) you're using, and be related to this class's topic in some way.
This is the part that most students find easiest. Most people will write a thesis statement that clearly references the assigned material.
For the sake of an example here, we're going to pretend that we have a class called "Women in European Fairy Tales," and we just had a week where we read the story "Little Red Riding Hood." I think most of you are familiar with the story, but if not, feel free to read a quick summary here, under "Original Version" and "Later Variant".
So for a thesis assignment that week, everyone would write a thesis that was clearly about the story "Little Red Riding Hood," and would probably focus on the girl or the grandmother (or both) in that story. That's our topic.
A Thesis Statement Makes an Argument
This is the main difference between a book report, and an essay on the same book: the essay is making a specific argument based on the book, while the book report is summarizing the book. Learning how to summarize something you've read is useful in many ways, so there's a reason it's often one of the first types of writing assignments you get in classes about reading! It's a way of showing that you understood the content of what you read, and can explain it clearly to someone else.
But an essay isn't a summary. An academic essay on a piece of literature should summarize only when necessary to explain something important to your argument. You can give very brief summaries of the whole piece when it's useful to you, but keep them short! An academic essay is making a claim about the text (or about something larger, using the text as a way to prove it), and the thesis statement should be explaining that claim.
So if you're writing a thesis statement based on Little Red Riding Hood, "This story is about a girl who takes a basket to her grandmother in the woods, but encounters danger from a wolf" isn't a thesis statement: it's just a summary.
Any statement that would appear on the back cover of a book, or in a summary of a play, or which is said explicitly in the text, or is a clear description of the text/art itself, is not a thesis statement. It's too obvious! You can't argue about obvious things, because no one would reasonable would disagree. "Little Red Riding Hood is a girl who wears a red hood" is not a thesis statement. "Little Red Riding Hood has the color of her clothing right in the title of the story because red symbolizes menstrual blood and the story is symbolic of her coming of age" may or may not be true, but now it's an argument the writer is making. That's a thesis statement.
If you could write and support your thesis statement based entirely on a summary of the primary source, then your thesis isn't deep enough yet. You need to go beyond the explicit and obvious to make an argument for something a little further below the surface.
An Academic Thesis Statement Is Not Aesthetic or Moral Opinion
One way teachers may help students learn how to write an essay is by assigning opinion writings. That's an assignment where you can choose any opinion you happen to have--"Chocolate is better than vanilla," "The Elder Rings is a brilliant video game franchise," "Picasso is an overrated artist," "There should be more laws protecting animals against human cruelty," "Julius Caesar was a bad man"--and argue in favor of your opinion.
This is a useful skill to learn, and probably one you have reason to use in your daily life. But the thesis for an academic paper needs to go beyond personal opinion. For some classes, "Little Red Riding Hood is an unsatisfying story because both the girl and her grandmother have to be saved by a man" would be a perfectly good thesis! But that kind of opinion isn't doing enough analysis to be a good thesis for an academic essay.
You can talk about aesthetic or moral effects of the text, especially in terms of what the text is trying to do, or what the author might have meant, or how the original audience received it, or what it tells us about how the society in which it was created thought about/valued various aesthetics and morals. But your own opinions of that sort--liking, disliking, thinking something is done well or badly, approving or disapproving of character (or historical figure) actions--shouldn't be part of the thesis. They're great to write about! But for other purposes than thesis assignments and papers in this kind of class.
A Thesis Predicts Analysis
When someone reads the first paragraph of an academic essay, you want them to think: "Oh, that's an interesting claim. I wonder how they'll prove it's true?" If you can give all the supporting evidence for your thesis--not just saying the points you'll be making, but all the actual evidence for them--in your first paragraph, you're probably not going deep enough.
"Our earliest written version of Little Red Riding Hood comes from Charles Perrault" might be a thesis statement if this was something people weren't sure about, and you were going to use a lot of historical evidence and citations of specific manuscripts, letters, and so forth to prove that he wrote the earliest version we have. But it's clearly not going to be analyzing the text of "Little Red Riding Hood" itself. However, "Little Red Riding Hood focuses on physical boundaries to show the hazards of transition states" might be a good academic thesis: you could analyze the implied and explicit locations of the story, show how the dangers attach to moving through or lingering in those transitional spaces and safety is associated with distance from those spaces, and so forth. That's the kind of thesis that clearly indicates you'll be looking deeply at the story ahead.
A Thesis Fits Its Assignment Length
This isn't so much a definition as a practical aspect. The broader your thesis, the harder it is to support it sufficiently in a short paper: the narrower your thesis, the harder to fill a long paper with relevant analysis and explanation.
"The wolf in this story acts like a dangerous human man, not an actual wolf" is an argument you could support with reference to the story itself and examples from zoology articles on wolves plus sociology articles on "stranger danger" types of situations: but you'd prove your point so fast, it wouldn't be a very long paper. "The transitional spaces of Little Red Riding Hood are deeply unusual among all the fairy tales that Perrault recorded" would require looking at every single fairy tale that man recorded, and analyzing the transitional spaces of every single one: that would be a very long paper to support well!
Generally the broader and more general your thesis, the longer the paper it's suited for. The narrower and more specific your thesis, the shorter the paper it's suited for. Keep this in mind when picking theses for short papers versus your research paper.
Examples
Rather make you take a quiz on this, I'll just provide some examples of good and bad thesis statements. Note that this isn't about how easy or hard the statements would be to argue for: some of them are rather silly, and would be hard to argue convincingly. I'm trying to show you the difference between what a good thesis statement and a bad one looks like, regardless of how well it then gets supported.
Summary, Not A Thesis Statement
- There is a wolf in this story.
- Little Red Riding Hood takes a basket to her grandmother.
- This story comes from Europe.
- The Perrault version of this story does not have a happy ending.
- This story depicts two female characters in danger from the wolf.
- The protagonist of the story is constantly referred to by the clothing she wears.
- Red shows up as an important color in this story.
- The danger of going into the forest alone is a theme of this story.
Opinion, Not An Academic Thesis Statement
- It's strange that the grandmother lives alone in the woods.
- The girl was too young to go into the woods alone.
- The wolf was justified in eating the grandmother, but not the little girl.
- The version with the happy ending ruins the message of the original story.
- Disney should make a major animated motion picture based on this story.
- The girl is responsible for what happened because she provoked the wolf.
- Little Red Riding Hood is a better story for children than Cinderella is, because the characters are saved through community bonds rather than by beauty and fashion.
Actual Thesis Statement... but Off Topic for a "Women in European Fairy Tales" class
- This story harms the reputation of wolves by teaching children that they're dangerous and eat humans.
- The wolf represents the French monarchy at the time Perrault was writing.
- This story is a xenophobic warning against foreigners, claiming that even those who seem to have assimilated and speak the local language are still dangerous and manipulative.
- The German version of this story was influenced by the French version, and not recorded from a different oral tradition.
- The happy ending is evidence of werewolf hunters in Germany.
- This story adapts the fairy tale about the wolf and goats to be about a wolf and humans instead because its intended audience are sedentary farmers rather than nomadic herders.
A Good Thesis Statement for the "Women in European Fairy Tales" class
- This story was meant to warn women away from living idependently.
- Little Red Riding Hood does not represent a female coming-of-age, because the girl acts far too young to have hit puberty yet.
- The grandmother in this story shows that widows among the peasantry were excluded from village life.
- This story demonstrates a societal concern for how women are physically vulnerable to men.
- The change from a tragic ending to a happy one between the two versions shows that the audience empathized with the female characters.
- Women in Europe were kept from becoming woodcutters by being terrorized with unrealistic stories about the dangers of the woods.
- The talking wolf symbolizes the girl's internal struggle with how the Catholic Church treated women at the time.
- The grandmother and the wolf are actually in a romantic relationship, but this is coded in a way women would recognize when hearing the story while men and children would not.