SPARK: Student Papers and Academic Research Kit: Drafting & Your Working Thesis

Keep in mind the notion that your essay is an exercise to “test” or “try” such things as:

• an idea you are developing
• a theory or understanding of a situation
• a way of describing or analyzing an issue
• a way of thinking or a point of view

Trying out alternative ways of expressing and connecting your ideas will help you understand them well enough to judge their strength, importance, complexity, and other characteristics that can help you find the best order for presenting them.

While building and exploring ideas, continue to apply strategies for generating ideas such as those described in the The Topic module, for example:

• review the assignment instructions
• brainstorm examples and ways to develop ideas
• review the resources you have selected to see what else they have to offer – examples, evidence, alternative ideas
• consider what your readers need in order to understand your ideas 

While you are writing, be willing to go back and forth between writing, researching and revising tasks. Writing is an act of creation, so be willing to change your work at any time, even right up to the deadline. Be wary of arriving at a definitive position on your topic too quickly. As you write, you will develop a more complete vision of your topic and the issues that surround it.

Developing a working thesis can serve to tell you what further information you need to provide in the essay and help you decide on the order of your ideas, or what further arguments you need to support the working thesis. 

After a few cycles of stating, working with, and revising a working thesis, you will be able to see how your ideas change or evolve over time, and you will start to see what will become your final thesis emerge. 

As you write, keep returning to the question that you hope your essay will answer. Don’t hesitate to revise this question as your understanding of the topic develops. Each time you do so, consider what your possible or probable answer is at that point. This answer can be written out in sentence form and serve as a working thesis, something like a hypothesis that you are testing. 

Your working thesis should state your position on your topic and not simply present a topic. One way to generate a working thesis is to complete the following sentence in relation to the question you hope your essay will answer:

            At this point I think I am going to argue that ….