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.
The two sentences above are the thesis statement.
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 second sentence outlines my stance (my position or opinion): that music should be taught to children. The word "should" is important - it indicates a recommendation and is a pointer to the writer's opinion.
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.
There are some strong claims in this thesis statement. First of all that learning music has many benefits. Secondly, that these benefits include improvement of various skills, memory and self esteem. Strong claims need strong evidence. But I have this evidence from the research I have conducted. And I will present this evidence in my essay.
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).
I've moved the thesis statement to the end of the introduction. And later I'll write the beginning of the introduction. The best place for the thesis statement is at the end of the introduction because this is where it has the greatest impact.
Paragraph 1: There are 5 main points from my thesis statement which I need to explain and justify in the body, so I’ll need at least 5 paragraphs. But I’m going to start with an introductory paragraph about learning music at a young age.
Paragraph 2: In this paragraph I’m going to explain why learning music can help with improving social skills. I’ll make reference to some of my research which supports this claim.
Paragraph 3: In this paragraph I’m going to explain why learning music can help with improving communication skills. Again, I’ll make sure I have support for this claim.
Paragraph 4: In this paragraph I’m going to explain why learning music can help with improving spatio-temporal skills. I’ll make reference to some of my research which supports this claim and make sure that I cite my sources.
Paragraph 4: In this paragraph I’m going to explain why learning music can help with improving memory. I’ll support this claim with examples from my research.
Paragraph 5: In this paragraph I’m going to explain why learning music can help with improving self esteem. Again, I'll support this explanation from my research into this topic.
Paragraph 6: The conclusion needs to refer back to your thesis statement, without repeating it word for word. You can, very briefly, summarise the main points you raised in your body paragraphs and make a final suggestion or give some advice.
You can now see why the thesis statement is so important.
It helps to focus your mind on the main points of your essay;
It helps you to plan your essay;
It helps the reader to understand right from the first paragraph what to expect to find in your essay.
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