The Thesis Statement: Real World Writers
Peter Farrelly
There's a similarity between the thesis sentence and a high concept.
Something About Mary is about a guy who tries to track down his high school girlfriend fifteen years later. And he hires a private eye to find her, the private eye falls in love with her, and they both battle it out for her affection. That's the one line, that's the high concept of it. However, it does get way more complicated than that, and in fact if it were that story alone it really wouldn't be very interesting.

Whitlow Au
Well, in a scientific methodology, you generally should make a hypothesis and then obtain data to either support or argue against your hypothesis. But oftentimes what happens, really happens, is that we make observations and with these observations we see certain kind of patterns that are emerging…you study, you observe, then you make a hypothesis, you study some more, you observe some more, then perhaps you refine your hypothesis, and to the point where you're pretty comfortable that you have sufficient data to support whatever your hypothesis might be.

Duff Brenna
But one of the things I say about a thesis is that it is sort of like the essay in miniature. It's the core of the essay, so you make some kind of statement that you are going to support constantly in the essay itself. And you can make it at the beginning, you can make it at the end of the first paragraph, or you can even imply the thesis within the first page or so. And it is the…it is the entire essay in a nutshell and so everything that comes after that thesis should support the thesis.

John Lovas
And the discipline, I like to say, is at this point now you must write your main point, your opinion, in one sentence. It's hard to do. It… "Oh yeah, write one sentence." What I find is, again, writers at the beginning will put their idea down in three or four sentences and what happens is they don't, it avoids committing to one, somewhere in there is the idea, somewhere in there is the argument. But by using three or four sentences you can kind of blur it.

Michael Bertsch
Well, the controlling idea is merely a collection of words from which we work. Out of the controlling idea we'll develop the thesis statement and that thesis statement will actually appear in the final draft. But the controlling idea just, well, controls our research. The controlling idea gives us a general direction where we're going and we may not know where we want to go until we've done some reading, and then we can develop our thesis statement. I want to get back to the organization of the argument. After having gone through topic, controlling idea, and then maybe working thesis statement, which still gives you permission to change that thesis statement later on. Once you get a working thesis statement, then you can start collecting support.

Santi Buscemi
What usually happens with a thesis statement is…the paper…they'll write a paper… they'll have a preliminary thesis statement, and then they'll write a paper that won't fit the thesis statement because writing is a process of discovery as I've said. And as they go through the drafting process they start to learn, something happens in their mind… they start to learn exactly what it is they want to say. What…exactly what point they want to say about their subject. It becomes clearer to them and more focused. So that the actual process of drafting is a focusing activity. And so, after they get to their first draft or their second draft, they haven't changed their thesis statement. The essay has changed their thesis statement, you know what I mean? Or calls for a change in the thesis statement. And that's fine.