Take a Thesis along

Think of a swamp. A noisome mass of life and liquid you'd rather not deal with. You'll probably want to get out as quickly as possible. If you forge ahead, then you have to hold your breath and try your luck. And there's nothing to let you know where you should be going.

That's an essay without a thesis: an entanglement of information that may be beneficial but it isn't clear how. Without something to indicate how to get through the quagmire, you'll end up lost and confused. A well crafted thesis in a well written introduction will give a piece of writing purpose and make it comprehensible for your reader.

"Cypresses"

A thesis is a one (or two) sentence statement of what you are trying to do in your essay. Drafting these sentences forces you to identify the relationship between your topics: how they influence one another, refine your overall topic, and what significant thing you have to say that brings everything together. You have to think about the entire essay and what conclusions you make and what your purpose is in writing the essay. This sounds like a daunting task, but if you use the six journalistic questions to sort out and clarify what you’re writing about, drafting a thesis and adhering to it can be much easier.

My other posts on the six journalistic questions deal with amassing ideas, but you need to figure out how and why you are bringing them all together for a thesis. For example, you may say you are interested in silent film and in pharmaceuticals. Two valid topics with nothing to do with one another (at least no connection I can figure out). Writing a thesis forces you to take these different things and explain, in about as succinct a way as possible, what they have to do with one another

The thesis gives you a way to make your responses to the Six Journalistic Questions more pertinent and interconnected as you say you are going to “compare and contrast this and that,” or “demonstrate how this can help resolve such and such an issue.” That lets the reader know what you are writing about, but also how you are using the information.

A thesis lets the reader know what to expect from the essay: what information you are dealing with and how you are dealing with it. It can be easy to slosh from paragraph to paragraph, but then you're leading your reader through an information quagmire. Make sure you have refined your topic and that your thesis shows up early and clearly enough that, no matter how messy the essay may be, there's something to give it purpose.

"Saltpancrk12"

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Works Cited

"Cypresses". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cypresses.jpg#/media/File:Cypresses.jpg

"Saltpancrk12" by Adam.J.W.C. - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saltpancrk12.jpg#/media/File:Saltpancrk12.jpg