Developing a Thesis

• First, discover a general topic. Often this is provided by your instructor.
• Second, narrow that topic. You can use invention strategies to narrow that topic, including asking who, how, where, when, why, what; narrowing by geographical area; narrowing by person or groups of people; narrowing by Library of Congress headings; narrowing by time period.
• Decide if your paper is informative or argumentative
• Determine the relationship(s) between topics you want to explore in your paper
• Write a full sentence as your first working thesis.
• Decide how ambitious you want your paper to be. How broad are your claims?
• Break your thesis down into subtopics and/or smaller tasks so you can write parts of the paper. Listing and then ranking those ideas/tasks online or on paper may work for you (I do this all in a word processor, so I can quickly rearrange and edit my working outline). Some of you may prefer a formal outline.
• Remember that your draft will differ from your outline. You may edit your outline as you go; you may find yourself creating a whole new subsection to your outline as you write. Stay open to the possibility that writing may lead you to areas you hadn't planned on exploring, and that you may end up throwing out some, or a lot, of what you've written.

The four essential elements of a thesis passage:

1. State the TOPIC.
2. State your POSITION or MAIN POINT/IDEA.
3. Outline the STRUCTURE of your argument.
4. Indicate why your thesis is CONTESTABLE, IMPORTANT or INTERESTING