I'm writing an English persuasive essay and I'm wanting to put a quote from a person as the thesis. How would I quote it? Do I quote it then put the name of person in parentheses? Please help me thanks!
The thesis needs to be YOUR IDEA, not someone else's. You should be able to use the quotation from the person somewhere else in your paper, but not in your thesis statement.
Whether you like it or not, the quality of your academic research paper rests entirely on whether you can uphold your thesis statement. You can be an amazingly eloquent writer with intelligent analysis and good ideas, but if your thesis is weak, the rest of your paper falls flat too. A thesis statement is the single most important aspect of any research paper — everything else exists solely to uphold and support it. It’s no surprise, then, that for serious students, the act of devising a thesis is stress inducing, nerve wracking, and dreaded. Here are 5 tips on how to make the pressure of coming up with a good thesis a little easier, and a lot less stressful.
5. Be relevant
Strong thesis statements are relevant to the coursework at hand. If you are taking a seminar on the importance of metaphor in the tragedies of Shakespeare, it goes without saying that you should not therefore write your thesis on the important of simile in his comedies. The more you structure your thesis after the relevant coursework, the happier your teacher will be and the more they will think you actually paid attention in their class, as opposed to secretly reading magazines on your Kindle under the desk.
4. Take a firm position
Strong theses are strong, literally. A good thesis takes a firm argument and shies away from wishy-washy statements with little weight or value. An example of a weak thesis: “There are some drawbacks to a Verizon cellular plan, but also some advantages as well.” This thesis tries to argue both sides of an issue, the way an expository essay would. Since research papers are not expository, but rather argument-based, they need to focus on a specific argument.
3. Be contestable
“A fern is a plant” is not a thesis. This is a fact. Thesis statements are not facts. They are statements inviting argumentation that can be supported by facts, but cannot stand alone as factual statements in and of themselves. A good way to gauge whether your thesis invites argument is to ask if it is contestable. “Malcolm X was a man who changed the face of race relations in America” is not a strong thesis, because it’s obvious that Malcolm X was a man who did just that. “Malcolm X was a man who irrevocably changed the rhetoric of protest in America, and his notions of violence within revolutionary dissent sheds light on the more recent event of the Los Angeles riots” is a stronger, and more arguable, stance.
2. Be specific
The more specific and ‘inbued with the nitty-gritty’ you can make your thesis, the better off your paper will be. By structuring your thesis around a specific point, the more structured your paper will be, and the more easy it will be to organize your ideas within the framework of your paper. I like to write thesis statements with multiple prongs. For example, “Poet (insert poet’s name here) writes against the patriarchy in the poem (insert poem here), and her dissent is apparent in her repeated use of the images of rotten fruit, serpents, and fallow fields as metaphors for the oppressiveness of feminine space as well as the poet’s perceived discomfort in her own female body in a society dictated by men” is an extremely specific sentence that invites many points of analysis and contention and outlines what each and every point of contention is, before the paper even begins.
1. Invite analysis
A good thesis gets you thinking, and not just thinking, but talking about the paper even after it is read. A good thesis also opens up the door for further analysis. If your thesis was arguable in 5,000 words, and your paper presented it and proved it and leaves it as a done deal once the paper concludes, then perhaps you could have written a better thesis. Think of your thesis as a gateway, not just into the discussions you will present in your own paper, but for further discussions down the road.