Thesis help needed with research report

by Faith
(Virginia)

I need essay help with discerning the difference between a 'research report' and an' informative research report.' I need to form a thesis statement for my research report...but the type of information I have is purely informative.....not persuasive!

How do I create a thesis statement when I'm not trying to persuade the reader...I'm just trying to inform them?

By the way, my research topic is 'the mafia'. Last year's research report was purely informative with no persuasive themes. I hope to write a research report in a similar fashion to how I wrote my report last year.

Is it possible to write an informative research report and still have a thesis statement that is written in 'active voice'?

I'm a sophomore in high school.

Linda responds

Those are pretty sophisticated questions for a high school sophomore, Faith. I'll bet you are a top student.

Textbooks say the purposes of main writing are to inform, persuade, and entertain. That's a convenient way to explain the uses of writing. However, it would be more accurate to say one of the three purposes predominates.

It is virtually impossible to have an informative report that isn't at least a little bit persuasive. Just the material you choose to use and what you choose to leave out implies an opinion. It may not be an opinion you feel strongly about, but it's at least a perspective on the topic. The opposite is also true: if you are going to persuade, you almost always have to inform as well.

• You create your thesis the same way regardless of your main purpose: topic + assertion about the topic.


• You write the persuasive and informative pieces in the same general way, but you adjust your tone to fit your predominant purpose.

Your thesis statement not only tells what your main point is, but also conveys your purpose. If you wrote that "Italians should wipe out the Mafia," you would be writing to persuade, wouldn't you?

However, if you said, "The Mafia is an integral part of Italian society" you'd still have a persuasive element in your piece, but the informative element would be at least as strong as the persuasive one.

I suspect the same information could be used to support either thesis; the overall structure of the two essays would be roughly equivalent. But the tone of the two pieces would be quite different. The first would be more aggressive, wouldn't it?

The active/passive verb distinction applies only to action verbs, not to linking ones. The sentence "Italians should wipe out the Mafia" is written in active voice. The sentence, "The Mafia should be wiped out by Italians" is in passive voice. They are both predominantly persuasive statements.

The grammar concept you are probably thinking about is the distinction between action verbs and linking ones. A thesis with a linking verb is somewhat more likely to signal a predominantly informative piece than a predominantly persuasive one, but the verb type alone isn't enough to set the tone for the pieces.

I hope that is helpful, Faith.

Good luck with your report. Come back and add a comment if you need more clarification.

Linda