Little darlings rock and roll palace

your task will become much more difficult. A thesis statement that is too general will leave you overwhelmed by the number of issues you must address. For example, the statement “Malls have ruined the fabric of American life” would lead to the question, “How?” To answer it, you would probably have to include information about traffic patterns, urban decay, environmental damage, economic studies, and so on. You would obviously have to take shortcuts, and your essay would be ineffective. On the other hand, too specific a thesis statement will leave you with too little information to present. “The Big City Mall should not have been built because it reduced retail sales at the existing Big City stores by 21.4 percent” does not leave you with many options to develop an argument.

The thesis statement is usually set forth near the beginning of the essay, although writers sometimes begin with a few sentences that establish a context for the piece. One common strategy is to position the thesis as the final sentence of the first paragraph. In the opening paragraph of an essay on the harmful effects of quick-weight-loss diets, student Marcie Turple builds a context for her thesis statement, which she presents in her last sentence:

Step 5: Revise Your Thesis Statement If Necessary

Remember that you are not unalterably committed to the wording of your original thesis, what writers call a working thesis. Just as you provide evidence to support the thesis statement, you are free to revise the statement to fit the evidence. For example, let’s suppose you decide to use the following thesis statement for an essay on internships:

We need a federally funded internship program.

You discover as you draft your essay that your evidence is largely financial. You learn that schools and businesses, especially in poorer parts of the country, refrain from establishing internships because there is little money for such efforts. You reason that if there were a federally funded program, students and businesses from any part of the country, regardless of local resources, would have an equal opportunity to participate. You then revise your working thesis to reflect this additional, more pertinent evidence:

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We need a nationwide federally funded internship program that will provide equal opportunity for

all students and businesses, regardless of their regional economic differences.

Models for Writers abounds in essays with excellent thesis statements, and we often ask you to identify them. Reading essays with strong thesis statements and locating the controlling idea in each is a great way to learn how to write your own strong thesis statements. Here are some more examples of thesis statements drawn from the essays in Models for Writers:

James Lincoln Collier states his thesis in paragraph 20 of “Anxiety: Challenge by Another Name” (p. 85):

The point is that the new, the different, is almost by definition scary. But each time you try something, you learn,

and as the learning piles up, the world opens to you.

Collier’s thesis appears near the end of his essay and consists of two sentences instead of a single statement.

Natalie Goldberg presents her thesis at the beginning of her essay in “Be Specific” (p. 330):

Be specific. Don’t say “fruit.” Tell what kind of fruit — “It is a pomegranate.” Give things the dignity of their

names. Just as with human beings, it is rude to say, “Hey, girl, get in line.” That “girl” has a name.

Notice how she offers a strong opening sentence, really a command, and then moves on to elaborate on what she means by being specific in the rest of her paragraph. It is a message she will carry through the rest of her essay as well.

Finally, in an essay about finding appropriate punishment for minor crimes, Dan M. Kahan in “Shame Is Worth a Try” (p. 557) offers the following thesis statement in paragraph 3:

[W]hat the shame proponents seem to be getting, and the critics ignoring, is the potential of shame as an effective,

cheap, and humane alternative to imprisonment.

With this thesis, Kahan expresses his argument and provides the reader with an outline of the three main points he’ll expand on in his essay to support that argument.

As you read through the essays in this book, be on the lookout for thesis statements that you find especially effective: Note their placement within the essay and think about why they’ve caught your eye. These can serve, then, as models for you when you write your thesis statement. For more on the various ways of developing an effective thesis, see Chapter 3, Thesis (pp. 71–74).