Materials for Students: Writing the Academic Paper: Developing Your Thesis

Materials for Students: Writing the Academic Paper: Developing Your Thesis

WILL THIS THESIS SENTENCE MAKE THE GRADE? (A CHECK LIST)

In the end, you may have spent a good deal of time writing your thesis and still not know if it's a good one. Here are some questions to ask yourself.

• Does my thesis sentence attempt to answer (or at least to explore) a challenging intellectual question?
• Is the point I'm making one that would generate discussion and argument, or is it one that would leave people asking, "So what?"
• Is my thesis too vague? Too general? Should I focus on some more specific aspect of my topic?
• Does my thesis deal directly with the topic at hand, or is it a declaration of my personal feelings?
• Does my thesis indicate the direction of my argument? Does it suggest a structure for my paper?
• Does my introductory paragraph define terms important to my thesis? If I am writing a research paper, does my introduction "place" my thesis within the larger, ongoing scholarly discussion about my topic?
• Is the language in my thesis vivid and clear? Have I structured my sentence so that the important information is in the main clause? Have I used subordinate clauses to house less important information? Have I used parallelism to show the relationship between parts of my thesis? In short, is this thesis the very best sentence that it can be?