5 Ways To Come Up With A Strong Term Paper Thesis
The thesis is one of the most important parts of your term paper. If you come in with a weak thesis, you are more likely to struggle with the point of the entire paper. There are a number of ways that you can come up with a strong term paper thesis, but these five are some of the most useful.
- Keep it simple. Do you have an idea of where you want to go? Then try to use one, maybe two sentences at most to explain your thesis. If the sentence(s) get clunky, then you may want to rework your thesis idea a bit before committing to it. The simpler it is, the better it will be for you in the long erun.
- Determine what you are trying to prove. What question are you answering? One of the best ways to figure out what your thesis is by evaluating what you are trying to prove in your term paper. If you can’t answer that question, or the question doesn’t seem to make sense, then reevaluate. Thesis’s are all about answering questions.
- Can you narrow it down further? One huge mistake that people make when writing term papers is that they don’t make their topic narrow enough. How can you do that? For example, say that you want to write a paper about psychology. Instead of just writing about psychology (which is a huge topic), you can decide on clinical psychology. That’s still not narrow enough; how can you break it down more? Then keep breaking it down until you can’t break it down any further.
- Do you have flexibility built in? You may get partway through your paper and realize that your research is taking you a completely different direction. Can you adapt your thesis statement to fit your research? Flexibility is absolutely vital when writing a paper; because you may make assumptions that you end up disproving.
- Talk to your professor about your thesis statement. Before you really get into it, go talk to your professor and see what they say about the thesis statement that you have thus far. They may suggest some of the things I’ve listed above, or they may have suggestions more related to what you’re doing. Your professor wants you to succeed, so make sure you communicate with them to make sure that you’re doing exactly what they are looking for you to do.