>> Welcome Sacramento City College writing center workshop
about thesis statements.
Thesis statements are an answer to the prompts question
when you're given an assignment.
They're a road map for your paper
for other people to follow.
They are a sentence or possibly two in a long paper,
that tells the reader what the essay plans to prove.
It controls the direction of your essay and is the main idea
or argument of the essay.
And it needs to be specific.
A thesis statement is not a sentence that has to start
with I believe or I think; now it is a statement of opinion,
but you don't have to say I think or I believe.
It's also not just a fact that someone can't argue about.
It has to include an opinion.
It can't however though, be an unsupported opinion.
You must give some kind of reasons for having that opinion.
And your thesis statement cannot be vague.
Some things to keep in mind when you're trying
to write a thesis statement is that it's basically an answer
to the question that is posed in the assignment prompt.
A lot of times prompt questions don't have an actual question
mark at the end, so you have to look for question words
like who, what, when, where, why, and how.
And look for words that tell you to do something, so verbs.
Look for words that say discuss, explain, or summarize.
And those will tell you what you're supposed to be doing.
So, when you're in doubt about you're supposed to write,
go back to the assignment and look at that
to help you get started.
Sometimes, instructors want you to give a thesis statement
that involves a list, which will tell us exactly what each
paragraph following will include.
This is called sometimes a divided thesis.
So, an example of that would be 'New York City is a wonderful
place to visit, because of its interesting museums,
beautiful landmarks, and exciting theater scene.'
So, when we write up that paper we'd have a paragraph
about museums, one about landmarks,
and one about the theater.
However, a lot of teachers discourage using this type
of a list because it can limit your structure
and give away all of your details.
Now, it limits your structure because if you talk
about anything in this paper that doesn't have to do
with theater, landmarks, or museums,
you're off topic from your thesis.
And you've limited yourself to only three body paragraphs.
If you have a ten page paper,
a divided thesis would involve almost a page worth of listing
of individual paragraph topics, which is going
to bore pretty much any reader, so you want to try to avoid it.
So, a way of avoiding that is to look at your supporting reasons
and see what they have in common.
In our example, interesting museums, beautiful landmarks,
and exciting theater scene all involve types of culture.
So, we can give a general description instead
of giving the list.
So, instead it would be 'New York City is a wonderful place
to visit because of its many cultural offerings.'
So we can talk about museums, landmarks, and the theater,
but we can also talk about street performers,
or artist landmarks, or artist lofts
that you might want to go to.
So, it can give us a much broader topic to go and discuss.
And it's really important to remember
that your thesis statement that you start with, doesn't have
to be the thesis statement that you turn in.
you can revise it, just like you revise the rest of your paper
to make it make more sense, be more closely connected
to what you write in your body paragraphs,
or simply to be more clear.
So, a thesis is the topic that you're writing about and so,
many assignments are going to tell you what your topic is,
so look at your prompt to make sure your on topic.
Sometimes though, your topics are really broad,
things like climate change.
And you to make that much more specific, so you might come
down to something more narrow like 'the effects
of climate change on the Antarctic ice shelf.
Then you're going to add an opinion.
So what do you think about this topic?
Some papers are going to require you to be either 100 percent
on one side or 100 percent on the other.
You either completely agree or completely disagree.
But in real life, most of us don't 100 percent agree
or disagree with most topics, and some papers will allow you
to explore that grey area, where you kind
of agree and kind of disagree.
It's good to be paying attention
to what your teacher expects there.
If they expect a strict yes or not,
give them a strict yes or no.
If they allow you to play around in the middle, you can go ahead
and do that if that's where your opinion lies.
If you don't know what you think about the topic,
spend some time doing research
or brainstorming ideas before you write your thesis statement.
Think about the experiences that you've had with the topic
or other people you knows experiences
and see how those help form your opinion.
And the last thing we want to have is a reason
or reasons why you have that opinion.
So, look at the prewriting that you've done, see what kinds
of reasons you've listed,
if your teacher requires a divided thesis
where you list, make sure you do so.
If your paper is more effective without one, then try to come
up with more general categories that your reasons belong to.
I would suggest particularly for long papers to try
to avoid a divided thesis,
try to come up with more general ideas, then very specific ones.
So, let's get some practice.
A prompt question you might be given is 'our students offered
enough support at Sac City College.'
We can get the topic from the question,
students at Sac City College,
my opinion they're offered a lot of support.
And my reasons, there's counselors, there's tutors,
there's RISE, there's MESA, there's librarians,
there's EOPS, we could probably talk
about all the different student support services for awhile.
But I don't want to list those for my thesis.
So the thesis I may come up with might be something
like 'Students at Sac City College are offered a lot
of support from both student service programs,
so that would be RISE, MESA, EOPS, and trained faculty
and staff members, like counselors,
tutors, and librarians.
And then I can talk about in paper, each of those things,
each one might be its own paragraph
or I might talk about them in groups.
I'm going to give you a few seconds to pause the tape
and work on coming up with topics, opinions,
and reasons for these other three.
This is a prompt that comes
from an English writing 300 class at this school.
It's been somewhat edited to fit more effectively
but it it's a prompt that's used fairly often.
If we are to read this prompt, we're going to have to try
to figure out what we're being asked to do.
So, let's read it together.
Social media has become a major part of many people's lives,
allowing people to connect with one another,
across physical and social divides.
However, many argue that social media makes people less engaged
in their real world lives.
Is social media a beneficial part of society, why or why not?
So, the first thing we find, as we look at this is the topic.
And the words that are repeated over and over, is a good place
to start, so that's going to be social media.
And we've already got a couple of opinions
about social media imbedded in the prompt.
One that's positive.
It allows people to connect.
And one that's negative.
It makes people less engaged.
So, we're going to be looking at either one side or the other.
So, either yes it is beneficial.
So we're going to answer why it is beneficial then.
Or no, it's not beneficial.
And so we're going to answer why not.
So, some quick brainstorming, yes it lets people connect
with friends, helps families stay in touch, keeps people
up to date without making much effort, shares stories
and photos with many people at once, and then downsides.
People spend more time on it than they do
with their actual real life family and friends,
it excludes people who don't belong to social media,
there's privacy issues, identity theft, security,
if you post something on Facebook about being
out of town, someone might come to your house and rob you,
that'd be bad and too much information.
Everybody has at least one friend who posts 50-60 pictures
of their cat every day.
And that's probably too much.
So, let's think about some possible thesis statements.
If we're going to go strictly yes it is beneficial
or no it's not beneficial, we've got those two directions to go.
Of course, some classes will allow you to go in between
and then you can talk about both.
But, let's look at these possible thesis statements.
So, social media is the beneficial part of society
because it allows people to stay connected
to the people they care about.
And here we've got our topic, social media is beneficial.
So, there's our opinion, it's good.
And then why.
Our reasons are because it'll allows people to stay connected.
The other side of that is social media is detrimental part
of society because it causes people to disconnect
from reality, over statutes users with information
and creates many privacy concerns.
So, here again, we've got a topic,
an opinion, and some reasons.
Now, in this case we've made it a divided thesis,
where we've listed each of our reasons
and we could have one paragraph or one section of the paper
on each of those reasons.
Where as in the other, we did a more general thesis,
which could allow us to branch out in more directions.
Either way though, we must have topic, opinion,
and reasons for the opinion in order
to have a solid thesis statement.
Again, most important thing to remember
with writing a thesis statement is to refer back to your prompt,
to make sure you're on topic,
and make sure you give us your opinion and reasons
for your opinion in your thesis statement.
Thanks for watching, have a great day!