Fishing Out The Right Words: Thesis Statement

English Professor Stanley Fish, a former professor at Florida International University, said sentence structure is the most important part of writing a college paper. In a blog written by Professor Fish, he says, “Basically, there is only one thing to be learned, that a sentence is a structure of logical relationships; everything else follows.” I do not agree with Professor Fish though. I feel a paper needs more than just the right sentence structure to be a successful paper. It has to have a basic argument or statement, which is stated in the thesis, and it needs to be obvious to the reader what that point is.

I spent eight weeks in The Writers Studio at The Ohio State University in Newark observing sessions between a student and a tutor to try to get a better understanding of what college writing is and what it consists of. While observing I realized one thing students should know about college writing and that is how to write a thesis statement and realizing it is a process.

Thesis statements can put your head up in the clouds!

A thesis statement is more than just a sentence. There are certain steps in order to create a thesis. One of the first stages of creating a thesis is organizing thoughts and ideas about the paper. While preparing to write a paper it is important to take notes and plan out everything before starting the actual writing. It is important to figure out what your main point or argument is. It helps to make an outline or do some kind of brainstorming activity before starting the writing portion. It is important for teachers to show students that writing a thesis would help organize the rest of the paper along with good prewriting techniques. It is a very important part of writing and a very important skill to be taught.

Since the thesis is always changing it’s important to be taught in the classroom because it is a complicated subject. Students may not understand how to work with one unless a teacher shows them the process and shows them how to work with it. It might be helpful to have a working thesis (placeholder thesis), which is kind of like a rough draft for your thesis statement. You can always go back and add things to it or take things out. The thesis can even be the very last thing you do in your paper if you are not quite sure of how to word it until you get your paper finished. Kory, the tutor I observed, had said, “A placeholder is something that you put in place of something else temporarily. It could be a word or a sentence, anything really. It's simply there to have something on the page, but you can always come back to it and change it. Thus, in a sense, a working thesis is a placeholder thesis; while it is a thesis, it can still be revised in terms of word choice, structure, length, etc. In other words, there's still some work to be done with it”

A thesis takes work!

Once you get your working thesis the way you want it, then you begin to revise it and make sure it states exactly what your argument is and is clear to the reader so they do not question what the point of your paper is. But, there is no “right way” to make a thesis or a “right place” to put it. There is also never really a final thesis. The thesis can always be improved and it can always be moved to a different area if that is where it fits best. Planning a thesis in the beginning is just a first step to the rest of your paper. The thesis probably will not be fully developed until the end. This may be overwhelming and unsettling for students because their writing is always changing. So, it needs to be in the classroom so students learn ways to change the thesis the way it needs to be changed as the paper develops.

So, back to Professor Fish’s point, a paper is a whole lot more than just sentence structure. The thesis statement is one of the most important parts, because it pretty much makes the paper. The whole paper is based on one main argument or point and that is what the thesis statement is. Even though the thesis probably isn’t developed until the end, the whole paper is centered on that one point. In high school and middle school, English classes should really focus on how to learn the steps into forming a thesis statement and that will help with learning the basic ideas of how to write a nicely formed paper.