Triple thesis statement help
Use reading, writing, and grammar

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. 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 must write on one of the theses they develop or thesis building activities are 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.

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 like

• 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 statement — 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.