Triple help writing a thesis
Use reading, writing, grammar

There’s more than one way to give help writing a thesis to your students. In fact, there are three.

Smart teachers use them all.

Help from a reading perspective

Authentic writing prompts always specify a writing topic. Use that fact as the start of brief (but frequent!) reading comprehension activities using writing prompts. Show students how to

• Identify the topic specified in a writing prompt.

• Identify any potential assertions about that topic in the prompt.

• Identify the context for their thesis.

If you start in middle school spending five minutes helping students to analyze each formal writing prompt you give them, you won’t have to have a unit on answering test questions before they take their high-stakes exams in high school.

Help from a writing perspective

You can give students help writing a thesis while having them brainstorm ideas for responding to a writing prompt that doesn’t give one or more theses from which to choose.

All you need is a two-column grid. The topic from the writing prompt goes in the first column. Students brainstorm potential assertions about the topic and write them in the second column.

This activity can be fun — and it can also be a waste of time.

The only way this exercise helps students learn to create a thesis is if they must write a paragraph or essay on one of the theses they develop. Without that requirement, they won't see the relationship between a good thesis and a good grade.

Help from a grammar perspective.

A discussion of how to create a thesis statement gives you a great opportunity to help students understand the concept of a sentence.

Tell students that a thesis is made up of a topic and an assertion about the topic. The topic must be a noun (or noun phrase) and its modifiers. The assertion must be a verb and its modifiers.

A verb can show action or it can show what the medieval grammarians called “state of being.” I prefer to use somewhat more modern terms like assertion verb or existence verb, even though those terms aren’t found in any grammar books. These are verbs like

• is/are

• was/were

• become

• live

By themselves, a verb phrase and a noun phrase are just idea fragments. They have to be combined to produce an idea. In grammar, we call an idea a complete sentence. Only a complete sentence can function as a thesis statement. (Remember, “main idea” is a synonym for “thesis statement.”)

The best teaching practice combines all three approaches for giving students help writing a thesis — while simultaneously using thesis statements to help you teach reading, writing, and grammar skills.