Transcript Lesson 19 Essentials Video: Thesis

NICOLE: To develop a thesis, you need your topic, and you need your opinion on that topic. And you combine both the topic and your opinion to create your thesis. And I've kind of always just kind of flowed with that formula for the thesis.

CUYLER: The reason you write a paper is because there's something about the topic you don't understand. And so the thesis is oftentimes, for me, the question itself, or maybe, you know, the question rephrased as an answer.

GREGG: And usually the thesis has to be something that's really—it's generally complicated enough to where you can write the size of paper you need to write on it. But clear enough to where people get where you're trying to go. It kind of acts as an indicator or a contract with your reader over what the next couple pages of writing is going to be about.

HYESU: I guess usually people say start with an argument so that you can support it with details later. But I can't do that for some reason. I have to find the argument later. Because I think it's hard for me to articulate what I want to say to begin with. So it's easier to start with the details and kind of glean from that, like, what I was truly meaning argue.

HANNAH: A thesis used to be the be all end all of my paper. I had to write my paper according to my thesis. Because in high school, you have to turn in your thesis for your teacher to approve it. And then you have to write your paper. So the thesis was the end all be all. So I used to write my thesis first. And that used to be what my paper was going to be about.

Now my thesis is the reflection of what I have decided to write about. So it becomes not my end all be all. It's not the god of the paper. So it becomes the reflection of my paper.

LILI: Well a thesis statement is not something really easy either. First of all, it's not a one sentence. It's not two sentence. It can be a paragraph sometimes. And it has to be something that you're going to talk about in your paragraphs. Like, a reader will read your thesis theme and know this is what Lili's going to talk about for the rest of the paper.

DEONTA: And I've even been told that some people put the thesis at the end of the paper. But I'm not really sure about how to do that yet.

NICHOLAS: I don't think about a thesis statement that's going to be generic or has been done before. That's why it's so hard. Is if you don't have something that's strictly interesting and compelling and different and maybe a little weird, then I think that you're not challenging yourself. And so my answer is, challenge yourself. Do what hasn't been done before.