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Readers need guidance. To guide readers through a piece of writing, a writer can provide five basic kinds of cues, or signals:

This chapter illustrates how each of these cueing strategies works.

Orienting Statements

To help readers find their way, especially in difficult and lengthy texts, you can provide two kinds of orienting statements: a thesis statement, which declares the main point, and a forecasting statement, which previews subordinate points, showing the order in which they will be discussed in the essay.

Use thesis statements to announce the main idea.

To help readers understand what is being said about a subject, writers often provide a thesis statement early in the essay. The thesis statement, which can comprise one or more sentences, operates as a cue by letting readers know which is the most important general idea among the writer’s many ideas and observations. In “Love: The Right Chemistry” in Chapter 4, Anastasia Toufexis expresses her thesis in the second paragraph:

O.K., let’s cut out all this nonsense about romantic love. Let’s bring some scientific precision to the party. Let’s put love under a microscope.

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When rigorous people with Ph.D.s after their names do that, what they see is not some silly, senseless thing. No, their probe reveals that love rests firmly on the foundations of evolution, biology and chemistry.

Readers naturally look for something that will tell them the point of an essay, a focus for the many diverse details and ideas they encounter as they read. They expect to find some information early on that will give them a context for reading the essay, particularly if they are reading about a new or difficult subject. Therefore, a thesis statement, like Toufexis’s, placed at the beginning of an essay enables readers to anticipate the content of the essay and helps them understand the relationships among its various ideas and details.

Occasionally, however, particularly in fairly short, informal pieces, a writer may save a direct statement of the thesis until the conclusion. Ending with the thesis brings together the various strands of information or supporting details introduced over the course of the essay and makes clear the essay’s main idea.

Some essays, particularly autobiographical essays, offer no direct thesis statement. Although this can make the point of the essay more difficult to determine, it can be appropriate when the essay is more expressive and personal than it is informative. In all cases, careful writers keep readers’ needs and expectations in mind when deciding how — and whether — to state the thesis.

Use forecasting statements to preview topics.

Some thesis statements include a forecast, which overviews the way a thesis will be developed, as in the following example:

In the three years from 1348 through 1350 the pandemic of plague known as the Black Death, or, as the Germans called it, the Great Dying, killed at least a fourth of the population of Europe. It was undoubtedly the worst disaster that has ever befallen mankind. Today we can have no real conception of the terror under which people lived in the shadow of the plague. For more than two centuries plague has not been a serious threat to mankind in the large, although it is still a grisly presence in parts of the Far East and Africa. Scholars continue to study the Great Dying, however, as a historical example of human behavior under the stress of universal catastrophe. In these days when the threat of plague has been replaced by the threat of mass human extermination by even more rapid means, there has been a sharp renewal of interest in the history of the fourteenth-century calamity. With new perspective, students are investigating its manifold effects: demographic, economic, psychological, moral and religious.

— WILLIAM LANGER, “The Black Death”

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As a reader would expect, Langer divides his essay into explanations of the research into these five effects, addressing them in the order in which they appear in the forecasting statement.