The Impact of the Thesis
Seth French
Thoughts to Consider
As with any essay you write, your thesis is one of the most important components of your essay. As such, it is vital that your thesis is clear and effectively addresses the writing prompt inside. For the narrative essay, your thesis will likely be a realization you have come to or perhaps a life lesson you have learned from the story you are writing about. We will discuss in a moment where in your essay you should include your thesis, but for now let’s consider other important thesis-related points to keep in mind as you compose your essay.
Keep in mind that while you are telling a story with the narrative essay, the goal of your story is to support your thesis. Regardless of how interesting or well-written your story may be, if it fails to support your thesis then you will need to make significant revisions to it before submitting your final draft. When some students struggle to develop a working thesis, they choose to simply construct the rest of their essay and then create their thesis later. This is not a wise strategy. Your thesis should determine how you construct your essay, not vice versa. Thus, determining your thesis should be one of your first objectives to complete in the composition process. Once you have your thesis, you may still need to refine it throughout the drafting process, but the general idea of your thesis will likely remain the same.
As you compose the various parts of your essay throughout the drafting process, you should repeatedly ask yourself, “How does this support my thesis?” If you respond to this question honestly as you draft, you will be able to identify the strengths of your essay as well as the weaknesses and address them accordingly. Failing to support your thesis is generally the result of your details being insufficient, irrelevant, and/or incoherent.
You may include your thesis in either the introduction or the conclusion of your essay. To help you choose where it would be best to include it for your particular essay, keep the following considerations in mind.
Thesis in Introduction
Including your thesis in the introduction is common across virtually all academic writing contexts because it helps you establish a clear focus early in the essay and gives your audience a general idea of what your essay is about before reading it in its entirety. Often you will find the thesis as either the first sentence or the last sentence in the introduction, although including it as the last sentence of your introduction is more common and often preferred. Your introduction does not need to be very long because the majority of what you communicate to your audience will be in the body of your essay, but it should contain the following aspects: hook/attention getter, optional development sentence(s), and a thesis.
The first sentence of your essay is often called an attention getter or hook because you want to get your audience’s attention (or “hook” them) from the v