Write a thesis first thing
Good timing aids efficiency and success

If students write a thesis statement at the very start of the writing process, it boosts their chances of turning out a good paper with a minimum amount of revision.

Timing is crucial.

Sadly, most English texts focus on defining the term thesis but don't explain how or when to do it.

The timing is crucial.

Students must get a controlling idea on paper at the very start of the writing process, or they will rewrite endlessly trying to discover a main idea.

Bright, motivated kids who like writing may be content to spend hours freewriting to find an idea. The vast majority of students who, at best, tolerate writing are totally turned off if they don't see some results quickly.

Efficient writers write about a thesis

I’m too embarrassed to tell you how long I’d been teaching writing before I finally understood that good writers write about a thesis instead of about a topic. They don’t write War and Peace and then try to figure out what point they made.

Efficient writers decide what they want to say about their topic before they do anything else. Then that thesis statement becomes the controlling idea for their writing.

Once the light dawned, it changed forever the way I write and the way I teach writing. It could do the same for you.

Assert something, anything

I recently took a customer satisfaction survey. As part of the survey I had to say indicate how satisfied I was with a store’s return policy. I’d never returned anything there, but I was forced to pick a response.

Sounds silly, doesn’t it? But having to say something — anything — kept me moving through the survey. If I had found two or three questions in a row for which I had no response, I would have quit the survey before I finished.

That you-must-keep-going model is the way students should start preparing to write. They should assert an opinion on a topic whether they have an opinion or not. Having to say something will keep them moving forward.

Everything else students learn about how to write a thesis is almost worthless unless they know enough to do it first.

Write a thesis to start a plan

Starting to plan an essay by writing a thesis statement may sound crazy, but it works.

1) It fits the way the way the real world operates.

In real life situations, ordinary people don't sit pondering what to write about. The topic is a given. It comes with the assignment. It’s up to the writer to come up with an idea (let’s call it an assertion) about that topic.

Topics are given to writers in business, in college classes, and in every high school class except English. (As any student can tell you, English class is not real life.)

2) It limits the number of ideas a writer has to think about.

Even dumb students have millions of ideas. In fact, struggline students are often overwhelmed by the sheer number of possible writing topics. Students who learn the trick of fast-forwarding from topic to thesis statement avoid that anxiety and frustration.

If they are lucky, writers are given both a topic and a choice of assertions they can combine into controlling idea.

More often, though, they have to invent an assertion in order to write a thesis. When they have thousands of potentially viable assertions on a topic, good writers pick the first likely looking one they see.

3) It feels right.

Even the dumbest students know instinctively that the sooner they start writing sentences, the sooner they'll finish their assignment. Professional journalists feel the same way. As a newspaper reporter, I knew as soon as I got that nugget, I could whack out a story in a few minutes.

Statement acts as security guard

If students begin the writing process by drafting a working thesis, that statement acts like a security guard: it lets in only those ideas that belong in the paper and turns away ideas that belong somewhere else.

Let me give you a simple example. Let’s suppose Josh has to write an essay about My Friend Flicka. He grabs an assertion before he does any serious thinking. His initial opinion is that the film version of My Friend Flicka is basically faithful to the book.

Working with that main idea, Josh can ignore everything except a comparison of the book and the film version. He’s not likely to plan a paragraph about diseases of the horse or about going on a trail ride because those ideas don’t belong with his main idea.

Even if Josh decides after he's done some research (such as reading the novel!) that his first guess was wrong, he will have a limited number of related ideas from which to make a second choice.

Teaching students to write a thesis statement first thing, before they do any serious thinking or research, helps them unify their papers — and makes grading those papers a whole lot easier for you.