TIPS FOR WRITING A THESIS ?
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rmine what kind of paper you are writing:
* An ANALYTICAL paper breaks down an issue or an idea into its component parts, evaluates the issue or idea, and presents this breakdown and evaluation to the audience.
* An EXPOSITORY (explanatory) paper explains something to the audience.
* An ARGUMENTATIVE (persuasive) paper makes a claim about a topic and justifies this claim with specific evidence. The claim could be an opinion, a policy proposal, an evaluation, a cause-and-effect statement, or an interpretation. The goal of the argumentative paper is to convince the audience that the claim is true based on the evidence provided.
If you are writing a text which does not fall under these three categories (ex. a narrative), a thesis statement somewhere in the first paragraph could still be helpful to your reader.
2. Your thesis statement should be specific—it should cover only what you will discuss in your paper and should be supported with specific evidence.
3. The thesis statement usually appears at the end of the first paragraph of a paper.
4. Your topic may change as you write, so you may need to revise your thesis statement to reflect exactly what you have discussed in the paper.
Thesis Statement Examples
Example of an analytical thesis statement:
An analysis of the university admission process reveals one challenge facing counsellors: accepting students with high test scores or students with strong extracurricular backgrounds.
The paper that follows should:
* explain the analysis of the uni admission process * explain the challenge facing admissions counsellors文章历史打印请求成为作者Tips and Examples for Writing Thesis Statements Tips for Writing Your Thesis Statement
Example of an expository (explanatory) thesis statement:
The life of the typical uni student is characterized by time spent studying, attending class, and socializing with peers.
The paper that follows should:
* explain how students spend their time studying, attending class, and socializing with peers
Example of an argumentative thesis statement:
High school graduates should be required to take a year off to pursue community service projects before entering university in order to increase their maturity and global awareness.
The paper that follows should:
* present an argument and give evidence to support the claim that students should pursue community projects before entering college.
More tips from By Italki member Nanren888
Avoid 1st person, (I, we) in the text, the passive is a good way round it. It seems maybe less important than it once was. Is your audience progressive or traditional? The safe approach is to avoid the 1st person, by Wording things differently. I suspect that using "we" is more common in the abstract. Usually there is a way to reword. I scan the abstracts from the last conference "We use a broadband variant ".... "Wide band acoustic signals are employed" ... "This paper compares the performance of "... "We describe recent developments in modem-based"... single author paper "This paper presents a quantitative analysis"... "We will provide an in-depth look"...
In the text "Here we consider only our worst case with the low SNR type D"... Worded to include the
reader? (Scottish paper) "To identify the featureless classifier to use, we consider how other applications with similar issues"... (US paper)
It seems they make "we" more acceptable by not starting with it? "Once features are detected, they can be described".. (Canadian paper has no 1st person" & uses passive voice a lot.)
HINTS FOR WRITING A LITERARY CRITICAL ANALYSIS
If you are planning to write a critical analysis, you can look into the four basic components in evaluating a literary material. Literary scholars call them as literary theories.
The first one is mimetic where you look into the realities the material copies or represents. This
discussion comes naturally as you delineate the main elements of the material you are evaluating.
The second one is expressive where you check how the author's biography and milieu affect or define the meaning of the work.
The third one is affective where you discuss the effect of the material to you as a reader, or how does the material leaves an impact.
The last one is objective which is the focus of most literary research these days. This study calls for a detailed discussion of how the elements of the literary piece contribute to the overall value of the work. These four theories are inseparable. As you discuss one, the other theories come in naturally.
These are key words that may help you define your literary assumption so you could get yourself focused on one research problem:
literary analysis critical analysis elements of fiction, poetry, or drama objective theory literary
neoclassicism formalistic theory in literature comparative literary study intertextuality