Selection of a Thesis Statement

We didn’t write a scientific research paper in my other writing classes. We wrote personal essays, reviews, proposals, arguments, and critical essays. When I was working in the ER we were required to write a report on a subject selected from a list of subjects that the charge nurse wanted to discuss that month in the group meetings. I specifically remember one that was a scientific research paper on the process of blood clotting and the use of anticoagulants that I had selected and was asked to do a presentation of because she thought I had done a very good job on it. I was nervous because several of the doctors had come to see the presentation. I guess that I must have impressed them and received a commendation letter from the base commander a few weeks later.

Ok, so one of the reading assignments this week was to read the section 5b “Writing a Thesis Statement “(p. 41-44.) It was enlightening to me and I thought I’d write about the process in my blog this week. For the project there are very specific instructions to follow about placement of the thesis statement, but not really how to derive one for your topic, this reading assignment covered it pretty well, answered all of my questions.

The reading assignment explained, “A thesis statement is one or two sentences that explains a paper’s argument, focus, or purpose. It is usually found in the paper’s introduction.” We were told in seminar to put ours as the last sentence of the introduction. The first step of formulating a good thesis statement was to do research on the topic and take a few notes from them about subtopics that interested me, and if I used direct quotes to be sure to get the citing information and record it in my notes so that I wouldn’t have to go back and re-read the paper, a time saving tip I thought was going to be very useful for doing this project.

The second step was called “Brain Storming” where I should analyze those notes to get a few ideas about subtopics and specifc aspects of the topic to generate some more notes about what other things I had left to do for research and try to formulate a few possible thesis questions from them in the third step.

The reading assignment stated, “To generate a research question, all you need to do is complete this sentence: I want to know why/how/what …” about this topic. Then from here, in order to formulate my research paper’s thesis statement, was to answer that question. Sounds pretty simple to me, but I’ll see how simple that is sometime later this week because the thesis statement is due!

Reference

VanDam, K. PhD. The KU Handbook for Writers. 2007. United States of America. Cengage Learning.