by Earl Mcgill

Created on: October 15, 2009

Before attempting to teach high school students how to write thesis statements for their essays, a teacher should clarify and simplify exactly what is meant by the term.

There was a time when a thesis statement was commonly called a topic sentence. The difference, it seemed, was that topic sentence somehow described a lower level of expectation. As one moved upward through the scholastic hierarchy, topic became thesis and sentence became statement. In essence, both state the main point and provide a clear purpose for the essay that follows. Nevertheless, a better way of describing this most important ingredient would be to call it a "control statement." The difference? For one, a statement can be as long or as short as needed. Thesis, generally a proposition maintained by argument, can be totally unacceptable, especially in situations that involve observable fact, such as "How I Spent My Summer Vacation-" a topic that can hardly be tailored to fit the Hegelian dialectic process.

A control statement must contain a concrete referent. Simply stated, the item referred to must have a visual quality that is similar for both writer and informed reader. Vacation, for example, is too abstract. One person's wonderful vacation can be another person's miserable experience. A concrete reference such as "backpacking in the Yellowstone wilderness" contains words that project similar mental images to those familiar with the meanings of the words. Think of the writer and reader watching a film and seeing the same images. An effective control statement should come as close as possible to this experience.

To be effective, a control statement must also contain a source, either real or implied. The "backpacking" example implies personal experience whereas, something like "Aliens from Krypton are all lazy bums," begs the question, "Sez who?"

Control statements should also as objective as possible. A "white cat" becomes "Mrs.Aguilar's Shaded Silver Persian" and "driving recklessly" becomes "weaving in and out of traffic." Using concrete referents sweeps away the fog and turns on the tiny camera running inside the reader's brain.

To facilitate the writing of concrete statements, each essay should be titled (a practice that seems to have gone the way of the semi-colon). The title should reflect the direction the essay is going to take. Unless very clever or very original, cute titles should be avoided because they tend to establish a false tone.

Fabrication can also be

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