8.4.1: Refine Your Thesis

Do I Need to Edit My Thesis?

A careful analysis of your notes will help you reevaluate your working thesis and determine whether you need to revise it. Remember that your working thesis was the starting point—not necessarily the end point—of your research. You should revise your working thesis if your ideas have changed. Even if your sources generally confirmed your preliminary thinking on the topic, it is still a good idea to tweak the wording of your thesis to incorporate the specific details you learned from research.

For most college papers, a thesis advocates a specific point of view on a debatable issue. In academic writing, the thesis is often stated directly somewhere in the first few paragraphs of the paper. A thesis is a point. Theses are not statements of facts, simple questions, or summaries of events. They are positions that you as the writer take on and defend with evidence, logic, observations, and the other tools of discourse. Most kinds of writing—and particularly academic writing—have a thesis, directly stated or implied. Even most of the writing we largely think of as informational has a directly stated or implied thesis.

Theses also tend to lend a certain organization to written arguments since what you include (or exclude) in a written text is largely controlled by the thesis. The main goal of the thesis (either as a specific statement or as an implied statement) is to answer two key questions that are concerns of all readers: “What’s your point?” and “Why should I care?”

A working thesis is more or less a temporary thesis you devise in the beginning of the research process in order to set some direction in your research. Your working thesis is temporary and should change as you research, write, and learn more about your topic. What does a working thesis look like? Before considering some potentially good examples of working theses, read through these bad examples of statements:

NOT Thesis Statements

None of these sentences would make effective theses because each of these is more or less a statement of fact. Of course, we could debate some of the details here. But practically speaking, most people would assume and believe these statements to be true. Because of that, these statements don’t have much potential as working theses.

• Computer crime is bad.
• Fisheries around the world are important.
• The Great Gatsby is an American novel.

NOT Thesis Statements Either

These revised working thesis statements are better than the previous examples, but they are not quite working theses yet. The problem with these possible working theses is that they are hopelessly vague and give no idea to the reader where the essay is going. Also, while these statements are a bit more debatable than the previous group of examples, they are still statements that most people would more or less accept as facts.

• There are many controversial ways of dealing with computer crime.
• There are many things that could be done to preserve fisheries around the world.
• The Great Gatsby is a wonderful novel for several different reasons.

Still NOT Thesis Statements

Each of these statements is close to being a working thesis because each is about an idea that has been focused into a specific topic. However, these statements are not quite working thesis statements because they don’t offer a position or opinion that will be defended in some way. To turn these topics into working theses, the writer needs to take a side on the issues suggested in the statements.

• This essay will be about the role computer hackers play in computer crime committed on the Internet.
• This essay will discuss some of the measures the international community should take in order to preserve fisheries around the world.
• My essay is about the relevance today of The Great Gatsby’s depiction of the connection between material goods and the American dream.

Possible Working Thesis Statements

If you compare these possible working theses with the statements at the beginning of this section, you can see the characteristics of a viable working thesis. Each of the working thesis statements takes a stand that is generally not considered a fact, is specific enough to give the writer and potential reader some idea as to the direction the writing will take, and offers an initial position on the topic that takes a stand.

• While some computer hackers are harmless, most of them commit serious computer crimes and represent a serious Internet security problem.
• The international community should enact strict conservation measures to preserve fisheries and save endangered fish species around the world.
• The Great Gatsby’s depiction of the connection between material goods and the American dream is still relevant today.

Another useful characteristic of a good working thesis is that it can help you as a writer to determine what your essay will NOT be about. For example, the phrasing of the working thesis on computer hackers suggests to both the reader and the researcher that the essay will NOT be about the failure of “dot com” business, computer literacy, or computer software. Certainly, these issues are related to the issue of computer hackers and computer crime, but these other issues will not become the focus of the essay.

Example \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Recheck Your Thesis Statement

• EVC Library Video: Thesis Statement

LICENSES AND ATTRIBUTIONS

CC LICENSED CONTENT

This page contains an adaptation from The Working Thesis Exercise (opens in new window). Authored by: Steven D. Krause. License CC BY-NC-SA.

Information on this page from Creating Your Argument is shared under a CC BY license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Elizabeth Burrows, Angela Fowler, Heath Fowler, and Amy Locklear (opens in new window).