There’s more than one way to give your students help writing
a thesis statement. 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, regular reading comprehension activities
using writing prompts as the reading material. 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 spend five minutes helping middle school 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 sentence 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 thesis builder
activity can be fun—or it can be a waste of time.
Students need to write an essay (or at least a body paragraph
for the essay) to get a feel for how a thesis guides the entire
writing project.
GAA
Help from a grammar perspective.
A discussion of how to create a thesis 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 such as:
-
is/are
-
was/were
-
become
-
live
By themselves, a verb phrase or a noun phrase are just idea fragments.
They have to be combined with something else to produce an idea.
In grammar, we call an idea a complete sentence. Only
a complete sentence can function as a main idea. (Remember,
“main idea” is a synonym for “thesis statement”
and a statement is, by definition, a sentence.)
The best
teaching practice combines all three approaches for helping
students write a thesis — while simultaneously using thesis
sentences to help you teach reading, writing, and grammar skills.
When all the students and their teacher gets helped, that's a
true win-win situation.
