Using a Thesis Statement to Plan your Essay

How your thesis statement can help you plan your essay

The most important sentence in your essay or report is the thesis statement. Everything you write hangs on the thesis statement and can be traced back to it. If it doesn’t, it should not be in your essay or report.

Once you have a clear thesis statement you can use it to plan your essay or report. The animation below shows you how. Use the controls to start, pause and reset the animation. The animation lasts for almost 3 minutes.

Learning music from a young age has been shown to have many benefits. Music should be taught to children in order to improve their social, communication and spatio-temporal skills, memory, and self esteem.
Learning music from a young age has been shown to have many benefits. Music should be taught to children in order to improve their social, communication and spatio-temporal skills, memory, and self esteem.
But why should children be taught music? The second part of this sentence gives 5 reasons: to improve children’s
1. social skills;
2. communication skills;
3. spatio-temporal skills;
4. memory;
5. self-esteem.
You can see now that the thesis statement gives you your essay plan. 

Like most pieces of writing, I’m going to have an introduction, a body and a conclusion.

First of all, I need an introduction (although you don’t have to write your introduction first - you can leave this until later; as you write you might get some ideas about what you want to include).
The first sentence contains the topic, which at first glance seems to be "learning music”, but you need to turn the sentence around to see that it is, more specifically, the benefits of learning music from a young age.
The two sentences above are the thesis statement.
Paragraph 1
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