The Thesis Statement

The thesis statement is that sentence or two in your text that contains the focus of your essay and tells your reader what the essay is going to be about. Although it is certainly possible to write a good essay without a thesis statement (many narrative essays, for example, contain only an implied thesis statement), the lack of a thesis statement may well be a symptom of an essay beset by a lack of focus. Many writers think of a thesis statement as an umbrella: everything that you carry along in your essay has to fit under this umbrella, and if you try to take on packages that don't fit, you will either have to get a bigger umbrella or something's going to get wet. The thesis statement is also a good test for the scope of your intent. The principle to remember is that when you try to do too much, you end up doing less or nothing at all. Can we write a good paper about problems in higher education in the United States? At best, such a paper would be vague and scattered in its approach. Can we write a good paper about problems in higher education in Connecticut? Well, we're getting there, but that's still an awfully big topic, something we might be able to handle in a book or a Ph.D. dissertation, but certainly not in a paper meant for a Composition course. Can we write a paper about problems within the community college system in Connecticut. Now we're narrowing down to something useful, but once we start writing such a paper, we would find that we're leaving out so much information, so many ideas that even most casual brainstorming would produce, that we're not accomplishing much. What if we wrote about the problem of community colleges in Connecticut being so close together geographically that they tend to duplicate programs unnecessarily and impinge on each other's turf? Now we have a focus that we can probably write about in a few pages (although more, certainly, could be said) and it would have a good argumentative edge to it. To back up such a thesis statement would require a good deal of work, however, and we might be better off if we limited the discussion to an example of how two particular community colleges tend to work in conflict with each other. It's not a matter of being lazy; it's a matter of limiting our discussion to the work that can be accomplished within a certain number of pages. The thesis statement should remain flexible until the paper is actually finished. It ought to be one of the last things that we fuss with in the rewriting process. If we discover new information in the process of writing our paper that ought to be included in the thesis statement, then we'll have to rewrite our thesis statement. On the other hand, if we discover that our paper has done adequate work but the thesis statement appears to include things that we haven't actually addressed, then we need to limit that thesis statement. If the thesis statement is something that we needed prior approval for, changing it might require the permission of the instructor or thesis committee, but it is better to seek such permission than to write a paper that tries to do too much or that claims to do less than it actually accomplishes.

The thesis statement usually appears near the beginning of a paper. It can be the first sentence of an essay, but that often feels like a simplistic, unexciting beginning. It more frequently appears at or near the end of the first paragraph or two. Here is the first paragraph of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s essay The Crisis of American Masculinity. Notice how everything drives the reader toward the last sentence and how that last sentence clearly signals what the rest of this essay is going to do. The first paragraph serves as kind of a funnel opening to the essay which draws and invites readers into the discussion, which is then focused by the thesis statement before the work of the essay actually begins. You will discover that some writers will delay the articulation of the paper's focus, its thesis, until the very end of the paper. That is possible if it is clear to thoughtful readers throughout the paper what the business of the essay truly is; frankly, it's probably not a good idea for beginning writers. Avoid announcing the thesis statement as if it were a thesis statement. In other words, avoid using phrases such as "The purpose of this paper is . . . . " or "In this paper, I will attempt to . . . ." Such phrases betray this paper to be the work of an amateur. If necessary, write the thesis statement that way the first time; it might help you determine, in fact, that this is your thesis statement. But when you rewrite your paper, eliminate the bald assertion that this is your thesis statement and write the statement itself without that annoying, unnecessary preface. Here are the first two paragraphs of George Orwell's classic essay, "Politics and the English Language" (1946). Which of these sentences would you say is or are the thesis statement of the essay which is to follow? Everything that follows in this essay, then, would have to be something that fits under the "umbrella" of that thesis statement.
What has happened to the American male? For a long time, he seemed utterly confident in his manhood, sure of his masculine role in society, easy and definite in his sense of sexual identity. The frontiersmen of James Fenimore Cooper, for example, never had any concern about masculinity; they were men, and it did not occur to them to think twice about it. Even well into the twentieth century, the heroes of Dreiser, of Fitzgerald, of Hemingway remain men. But one begins to detect a new theme emerging in some of these authors, especially in Hemingway: the theme of the male hero increasingly preoccupied with proving his virility to himself. And by midcentury, the male role had plainly lost its rugged clarity of outline. Today men are more and more conscious of maleness not as a fact but as a problem. The ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure. There are multiplying signs, indeed, that something has gone badly wrong with the American male's conception of himself. Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our languageso the argument runsmust inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.

Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

**If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

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Writing the Academic Paper

What is an academic paper? Coming up with your topic Researching your topic Developing your thesis Writing: considering structure & organization

Revision: cultivating a critical eye Logic and argument Attending to grammar Attending to style Students' Advice for Students

Attending to Grammar
On this page:

A Brief Introduction Most Commonly Occurring Errors Becoming Your Own Grammar Tutor Useful Links

A Brief Introduction
Grammar is more than just a set of rules. It is the ever-evolving structure of our language, a field which merits study, invites analysis, and promises fascination. Don't believe us? Didn't think you would. The fact is that grammar can be pretty dull: no one likes rules, and memorizing rules is far worse than applying them. (Remember studying for your driver's test?) However, as I've said, grammar is more than this: it is an understanding of how language works, of how meaning is made, and of how it is broken. You understand more about grammar than you think you do. Brought up as English speakers, you know when to use articles, for example, or how to construct different tenses, probably without even thinking about it. (Non-native speakers of English may struggle with these matters for years.) However, when you write, even as a native speaker of English, you will encounter problems and questions that you may not know how to answer. "Who" or "whom?" Comma or no comma? Passive, or active? To answer these questions, you will want to have a handbook on hand. Handbooks are available at RWIT; tutors are also available to help you find what you need.

Most Commonly Occurring Errors

Would grammar seem more manageable to you if we told you that writers tend to make the same twenty mistakes over and over again? In fact, a study of error by Andrea Lunsford and Robert Connors shows that twenty different mistakes comprise 91.5 percent of all errors in student

texts. If you can control these twenty errors, you will go a long way in creating prose that is correct and clear. Below is an overview of these errors, listed according to the frequency with which they occur. Look for them in your own prose.
1. Missing comma after introductory phrases. For example: After the devastation of the siege of Leningrad the Soviets were left with the task of rebuilding their population as well as their city. (A comma should be placed after "Leningrad.") 2. Vague pronoun reference. For example: The boy and his father knew that he was in trouble. (Who is in trouble? The boy? His Father? Some other person?) 3. Missing comma in compound sentence. For example: Wordsworth spent a good deal of time in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy and the two of them were rarely apart. (Comma should be placed before the "and.") 4. Wrong word. This speaks for itself. 5. No comma in nonrestrictive relative clauses. Here you need to distinguish between a restrictive relative clause and a nonrestrictive relative clause. Consider the sentence, "My brother in the red shirt likes ice cream." If you have TWO brothers, then the information about the shirt is restrictive, in that it is necessary to defining WHICH brother likes ice cream. Restrictive clauses, because they are essential to identifying the noun, use no commas. However, if you have ONE brother, then the information about the shirt is not necessary to identifying your brother. It is NON-RESTRICTIVE and, therefore, requires commas: "My brother, in the red shirt, likes ice cream." 6. Wrong/missing inflected ends. "Inflected ends" refers to a category of grammatical errors that you might know individually by other names - subject-verb agreement, who/whom confusion, and so on. The term "inflected endings" refers to something you already understand: adding a letter or syllable to the end of a word changes its grammatical function in the sentence. For example, adding "ed" to a verb shifts that verb from present to past tense. Adding an "s" to a noun makes that noun plural. A common mistake involving wrong or missing inflected ends is in the usage of who/whom.

"Who" is a pronoun with a subjective case; "whom" is a pronoun with an objective case. We say "Who is the speaker of the day?" because "who" in this case refers to the subject of the sentence. But we say, "To whom am I speaking?" because, here, the pronoun is an object of the preposition "to." 7. Wrong/missing preposition. Occasionally prepositions will throw you. Consider, for example which is better: "different from," or "different than?" Though both are used widely, "different from" is considered grammatically correct. The same debate surrounds the words "toward" and "towards." Though both are used, "toward" is preferred in writing. When in doubt, check a handbook. 8. Comma splice. A comma splice occurs when two independent clauses are joined only with a comma. For example: "Picasso was profoundly affected by the war in Spain, it led to the painting of great masterpieces like Guernica." A comma splice also occurs when a comma is used to divide a subject from its verb. For example: "The young Picasso felt stifled in art school in Spain, and wanted to leave." (The subject "Picasso" is separated from one of its verbs "wanted." There should be no comma in this sentence, unless you are playing with grammatical correctness for the sake of emphasis - a dangerous sport for unconfident or inexperienced writers.) 9. Possessive apostrophe error. Sometimes apostrophes are incorrectly left out; other times, they are incorrectly put in (her's, their's, etc.) 10. Tense shift. Be careful to stay in a consistent tense. Too often students move from past to present tense without good reason. The reader will find this annoying. 11. Unnecessary shift in person. Don't shift from "I" to "we" or from "one" to "you" unless you have a rationale for doing so. 12. Sentence fragment. Silly things, to be avoided. Unless, like here, you are using them to achieve a certain effect. Remember: sentences traditionally have both subjects and verbs. Don't violate this convention carelessly. 13. Wrong tense or verb form.

Though students generally understand how to build tenses, sometimes they use the wrong tense, saying, for example, "In the evenings, I like to lay on the couch and watch TV" "Lay" in this instance is the past tense of the verb, "to lie." The sentence should read: "In the evenings, I like to lie on the couch and watch TV." (Please note that "to lay" is a separate verb meaning "to place in a certain position.") 14. Subject-verb agreement. This gets tricky when you are using collective nouns or pronouns and you think of them as plural nouns: "The committee wants [not want] a resolution to the problem." Mistakes like this also occur when your verb is far from your subject. For example, "The media, who has all the power in this nation and abuses it consistently, uses its influence for ill more often than good." (Note that media is an "it," not a "they." The verbs are chosen accordingly.) 15. Missing comma in a series. Whenever you list things, use a comma. You'll find a difference of opinion as to whether the next-to-last noun (the noun before the "and") requires a comma. ("Apples, oranges, pears, and bananas...") Our advice is to use the comma because sometimes your list will include pairs of things: "For Christmas she wanted books and tapes, peace and love, and for all the world to be happy." If you are in the habit of using a comma before the "and," you'll avoid confusion in sentences like this one. 16. Pronoun agreement error. Many students have a problem with pronoun agreement. They will write a sentence like "Everyone is entitled to their opinion." The problem is, "everyone" is a singular pronoun. You will have to use "his" or "her." 17. Unnecessary commas with restrictive clauses. See the explanation for number five, above. 18. Run-on, fused sentence. Run-on sentences are sentences that run on forever, they are sentences that ought to have been two or even three sentences but the writer didn't stop to sort them out, leaving the reader feeling exhausted by the sentence's end which is too long in coming. (Get the picture?) Fused sentences occur when two independent clauses are put together without a comma, semi-colon, or conjunction. For example: "Researchers investigated several possible vaccines for the virus then they settled on one" 19. Dangling, misplaced modifier.

Modifiers are any adjectives, adverbs, phrases, or clauses that a writer uses to elaborate on something. Modifiers, when used wisely, enhance your writing. But if they are not wellconsidered - or if they are put in the wrong places in your sentences - the results can be less than eloquent. Consider, for example, this sentence: "The professor wrote a paper on sexual harassment in his office." Is the sexual harassment going on in the professor's office? Or is his office the place where the professor is writing? One hopes that the latter is true. If it is, then the original sentence contains a misplaced modifier and should be re-written accordingly: "In his office, the professor wrote a paper on sexual harassment." Always put your modifiers next to the nouns they modify. Dangling modifiers are a different kind of problem. They intend to modify something that isn't in the sentence. Consider this: "As a young girl, my father baked bread and gardened." The writer means to say, "When I was a young girl, my father baked bread and gardened." The modifying phrase "as a young girl" refers to some noun not in the sentence. It is, therefore, a dangling modifier. Other dangling modifiers are more difficult to spot, however. Consider this sentence: "Walking through the woods, my heart ached." Is it your heart that is walking through the woods? It is more accurate (and more grammatical) to say, "Walking through the woods, I felt an ache in my heart." Here you avoid the dangling modifier. 20. Its/it's error. "Its" is a possessive pronoun. "It's" is a contraction for "it is."

Becoming Your Own Grammar Tutor

Many of these errors you will find easy to spot and to correct. Perhaps you learned in high school to look for subject-verb agreement. Perhaps you consistently catch any confusion between "it's" and "its." Still, some of these errors will be harder to catch. How can you learn to handle these errors and to become your own grammar tutor? The first thing that you might do is to make a trip to RWIT. We have tutors here that might help you with grammar questions. They might help you to see patterns of error in your work, and they can give you advice as to how to eliminate these errors. They can also help you to get used to using a handbook. Every student writer should have a handbook on his desk as he writes. Even the experienced writer comes across grammar questions that she needs answered. In creating this Web page, for example, I consulted my handbook three times. When reading your papers for grammar errors, you'll want to make note of a few things.

First, determine whether the error is a matter of carelessness, or a pattern of error. If you find a single run-on in your paper, there's probably not much to worry about. Fix it, and be on your way. But if you notice that you tend to run on again and again, it's time to think about the run-on. Do you understand the boundaries of the sentence? Do you understand the

grammatical principles at work in determining these boundaries? If you think that you don't, consult a tutor and/or a handbook. Come up with strategies for addressing the problem so that it doesn't occur in future drafts.

Second, prioritize among your errors. If you find that your grammar problems are serious ones, determine which of the problems are most serious and address them first. Problems that interfere with a reader's understanding of your paper - misplaced modifiers, for example, or mistakes in punctuation - ought to be addressed first. If you have trouble determining which mistakes are most serious, visit RWIT. Our tutors can help you to map a course of study in matters of grammar.

Third, practice writing sentences. The only way to learn to write grammatically is to practice, practice, practice. If your writing is very weak, you might benefit from doing sentence exercises in handbooks to strengthen your understanding of grammatical principles. You will also want to use our Grammar Drills. If your writing is fair to middling, you can play with your own sentences, writing and rewriting them to see how using commas, for example, might change the effect or even the meaning of a sentence.

And finally, understand that grammar COUNTS. Your professors expect writing that is correct. They are irritated when you give them papers plagued by error. Your professors may or may not mark the errors on your papers. Don't expect that if you have no red ink on your paper that it is error free. Some professors feel that you should have mastered grammar before college and that it is not their responsibility to point out your mistakes to you. Others will be more helpful and will let you know when your grammar has gone astray. Still, it is your responsibility to master the rules of the language that you speak and write. Learn them well.

Useful Links
Note: Many of these sites will have links to other grammar guides and resources.
Grammar & Style Guides

Grammar and Style Notes by Jack Lynch

Grammar Points

Online Writing Lab Handouts, Purdue University Punctuation Made Simple

Dictionaries & Thesauri

Oxford English Dictionary Thesaurus.com

Written by Karen Gocsik Last modified: Tuesday, 12-Jul-2005 11:27:36 EDT Copyright 2004 Dartmouth College www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/ac_paper/grammar.shtml

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