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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
created 11-Sep-2008; updated 18-Sep-2008
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