Tools for the writing teacher:
Free examples of thesis statements

Students and teachers alike regularly seek free examples of thesis statements to examine and, I assume, use as patterns or even main ideas of essays.

Giving your students authentic writing prompts and teaching them how to read a prompt will eliminate the need for such crutches.

To help you see how the prompt-thesis relationship, I'm going to give you some free examples of thesis statements that respond to free writing prompts I've provided elsewhere on this site.

Instead of charging you for this material, I'm going to ask you to pay for it by trying your hand at writing a thesis that responds to each prompt. Call it sweat equity.

By writing these five sentences, you'll get a fairly good idea of the difficulties that students may encounter.

Ready?

For each item below, I've given you just the core directions. To see the entire prompt, click on the image box.

Prompt & thesis #1

This first prompt is for middle school students. It asks them to write a definition essay, though it doesn't use that terminology.

Life is easier if you don't introduce students to all the different types of essays until after they are competent at writing the essential one: the persuasive essay with its pattern of thesis and support.

I underlined the essay topic in the basic directions.

You have the topic. You just need to add an assertion to get a thesis. You can type your answer right in the Zoho word processor. (Slick trick: set the right margin for about 5.5 inches.)

Your thesis should look something like this:

Onomatapoeia is a literary term for words that sound like what they mean.

Don't worry about copying this all down. If you need the information you can download a pdf file of either the writing prompts of the free examples of thesis statements that are developed from them.

Prompt & thesis #2

The second prompt is also appropriate for middle school students. This time the topic is online searches. The topic and assertion are included in the prompt. See them? Write the thesis statement they make.

See what your flying fingers and brilliant brain come up with for this one.

Your thesis statement should look something like this:

Students can be more effective online searchers by using three tips.

Prompt & thesis #3

This next prompt is for high school students. Like the previous example, it includes both the topic and the assertion in the prompt. See them this time?

I'll bet you will knock this one out in no time.

Your response should look something like this:

Passive voice is preferable to active voice in three situations.

Your sentence won't match the one in my free examples of thesis statements exactly, but it should give the same general idea.

Prompt & thesis #4

The fourth prompt gives only a topic. Students have to develop their own assertions.

The prompt, however, helps students limit the potential assertions by giving them prep work that will naturally restrict the kinds of assertions they can make. You can see the full prompt by clicking on the image.

Whack that answer out.

Your answer probably reads something like this:

Ask good questions online by remembering five rules.

Your assertion was probably different, but you should have roughly the same topic and sentence structure.

Observations on the examples

As you read these prompts and wrote your theses, you may have realized that there is no relationship between how easy it is to write a working thesis and how easy it is to write a paper based on that thesis.

When you are teaching writing — or teaching a subject using writing — you need to test your writing prompts to see answering them actually entails.

Often something I think will be easy to write on turns out require skills or patterns I haven't taught. Rather than require students to submit work that requires knowledge I haven't taught, to be fair I have to scrap that prompt and write another.

You may also have realized that you can raise or lower the grade level of a prompt by changing the assignment details. For example, to make a writing assignment more challenging, you could require students to

• Use more types of sources.

• Develop their thesis by inductive analysis of specific information.

• Use skill or knowledge from more than one course component, such as literature and grammar.