How to Write A Good Thesis Statement
Essay writing is hard for everyone, whether you're in your freshman year of highschool or your freshman year of college. One particularly soul-crushing part of essay writing is, of course, crafting the perfect introduction. In argumentative essays, the most important part of the introduction is the thesis statement. This is doubly true if you’re suffering through APUSH. In this little article, I’ll show y'all some examples of good thesis statements, bad thesis statements, and how to make better thesis statements.
First, I’ll break down the structure of what a thesis statement should look like. Now, be aware that this isn’t the only correct way to write a thesis statement, but this is the way I like to write thesis statements.
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Basic argument essay thesis template:
Although some people may argue [counterargument], evidence such as [evidence one] and [evidence two] show [argument] is correct.
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Let’s practice using this template!
Question: To what extent did increasing taxes cause the American Revolution?
Before we make our thesis, we need to understand what the question is actually asking us. We can do this by analyzing the key words within the question. In the question I underlined two things: to what extent and cause. From these two phrases, we can understand that the question is asking us how much of a cause increasing taxes in the colonies was to the American Revolution—either a significant cause or an insignificant cause. From here we make both our argument and our counterargument.
Argument
I believe that increased colonial taxes was a significant cause of the American Revolution, so my argument is quite literally “Increased taxes were a significant cause of the American Revolution.”
Counterargument
To create my counterargument, I need to find the opposing stance to my argument, which would be “Increased taxes were not a significant cause of the American Revolution.” If you were in middle school, this would be enough of a counterargument to earn you a shiny gold star; but sadly, we’re in high school now, so we have to add a bit more detail. To transform this counterargument from middle-school level to high-school level, we need to add another possible cause into the mix. It’s important to add this to show to the graders that we are deeply engaging with both sides of an argument, meaning we have something to directly dispute within our essay that isn’t just- “some people think my argument is wrong, but it isn’t.”. An example of another possible cause of the American Revolution is the Line of Proclamation created by the British in 1763. This is a real argument that some people have, so it works as the perfect counterargument for us to disprove within our essay. From this, we can make the counterargument “The American Revolution was primarily the result of colonial anger about the creation of the Line of Proclamation in 1763. ”
Evidence
The most integral part of the thesis statement, other than the actual claim, is your evidence. Evidence helps to support your argument; essentially evidence is what you use to prove to the reader that your argument is correct and your essay is even worth reading. Thankfully, for pretty much every essay you have to write for classes like AP Lang, Global, and APUSH (ew) you are given almost all the evidence you need for your essay in the form of the provided documents. (read: almost all, you should very much still add in outside information as well as information from the provided docs.) It’s very important to know that your evidence isn’t the document itself, it’s the information that you can pull from the document (or documents if you're in APUSH). For example, in your thesis, you wouldn’t say, “My argument is true because document 2 and document 3 prove that increased taxes were a significant cause of the American Revolution.” You would want to state specifically what about the documents proves your argument. A better way to write that would be, “Acts such as the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts greatly increased colonial hostility and distrust of Great Britain; therefore, increased taxes were a significant cause of the American Revolution. ”
Our Final Thesis:
Now that we have all of our components, we can finally put our thesis together!
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Although some may argue that the American Revolution was primarily the result of colonial anger about the creation of the Line of Proclamation in 1763 by the British, acts such as the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts greatly increased colonial hostility and distrust of Great Britain; therefore, increased taxes were a significant cause of the American Revolution.
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One closing note
I can understand that this kind of essay writing all might seem super complicated and overwhelming, (especially given that you’re reading an article on how to write the first little tid-bits of an argument essay.) But as corny as it sounds you will get better at writing these kinds of essays, all it takes is practice, practice, and the occasional article or youtube video (I’d recommend Hiemler’s History for people taking any AP history classes) on how to write the especially scary parts. Always remember, practice makes progress!
Thank you for reading!
:)
(9/30/24)