Questions As Thesis Statements

You may have been asked in a previous class to put your thesis statement in the first paragraph of your essay.

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Thus every good essay has a thesis statement, though it may be implied rather than explicitly stated in the text of the essay.

If you are writing a primarily "informative" essay rather than a primarily "persuasive" essay, that doesn't mean your essay doesn't have a thesis; it just means that your thesis is a statement about which your readers are uninformed, rather than one on which they may have opinions that differ from yours.

Almost any good essay will have to inform the reader at some points and persuade the reader at others.

But every good essay is unified, moves toward a single major point.

A thesis statement, in other words, is only one sentence, not two or three or more. Because the thesis statement is the main point you want to make in one essay; so it should be one sentence.

Frederick Crews defines an essay as "a short piece of nonfiction that tries to make a point in an interesting way." What makes it an essay is that it aims to make a point, one point.The only reason for asking for a trial thesis statement is to allow us to have something to discuss in class.You will usually not finish writing your thesis statement until you have nearly finished writing and revising your essay.And if everything you say in an essay supports a single point or claim, then you can express that claim in a single sentence.Notice that nobody is saying that it must be a short sentence or a pretty sentence.You may often start work on your essay with a question in mind. Different essays will have different purposes, depending on your message and your audience.If you are writing about a topic that your readers know very little about, you will write differently than you would if you were writing about a topic about which your readers were well informed.Some textbooks attempt to break down the kinds of essays into categories like "informative," "persuasive," "expository," or "argumentative." These categories can sometimes be useful in thinking about your essay, but they are always a little artificial.No good essay is entirely informative or entirely persuasive.But it must be one sentence, not two or more sentences. A declarative sentence is simply a sentence that makes a statement rather than asking a question or making a command.If you can't express the main point of your essay in one sentence, your essay probably doesn't have one point; it probably has two. It is really saying the same thing twice to say that a thesis statement is a declarative sentence.