Academic and professional writing in the United States often contains an explicit thesis statement. You should establish a working thesis early in your writing process. Your final thesis may be very different from the working thesis you begin with. Even so, a working thesis focuses your thinking and research, and helps keep you on track.
A working thesis should have two parts: a topic, which indicates the subject matter the writing is about, and a comment, which makes an important point about the topic.
In the graphic novel Fun Home, illustrations and words combine to make meanings that are more subtle than either words alone or images alone could convey.
A successful working thesis has three characteristics:
You can evaluate a working thesis by checking it against each of these characteristics, as in the following examples:
Graphic novels combine words and images.
| INTERESTING? | The topic of graphic novels could be interesting, but this draft of a working thesis has no real comment attached to it—instead, it states a bare fact, and the only place to go from here is to more bare facts. |
In graphic novels, words and images convey interesting meanings.
| SPECIFIC? | This thesis is not specific. What are “interesting meanings,” exactly? How are they conveyed? |
Graphic novels have evolved in recent decades to become an important literary genre.
| MANAGEABLE? | This thesis would not be manageable for a short-term project because it would require research on several decades of history and on hundreds of texts from all over the world. |