tl:dr Comment below: What’s your thesis statement, where do you include it, and what does it do for your essay?
Your essay is an opinion essay, which is a bit different than an argumentative essay or a persuasive essay. That means you’re not necessarily saying that something is better than something else, or that one way is the right way to do something and the other way is wrong. Instead, your thesis statement is an opinion that someone could argue against, but not in a debate-style opposing-viewpoints kind of way. Remember my example from when we started talking about opinion essays: City Tech students will do better if there weren’t 8:00am classes.
Notice from my example, too, that thesis statements are statements, not questions. Usually they’re one sentence, but they could be two if that makes more sense.
We talked about how you want to make it clear what your opinion is in your essay, but that unlike a more traditional academic essay, your thesis statement doesn’t need to be the last sentence of your first paragraph. It’s more likely to emerge a bit later, after you get your reader thinking like you want them thinking, so after your hook at the beginning of the opinion essay.
One way to get a sense of thesis statements for opinion essays is to look for them in our readings:
- NYT Op-Ed: “What We Are Not Teaching Boys About Being Human” by Ruth Whippman.
- Op-Ed/Opinion Essay: “College Students Have Something to Say. It’s Just Not What You’d Expect” by Jonathan Malesic
- NYT video Op-Ed: “Greta Thunberg Has Given Up on Politicians”
- NYT Opinion Essay: “TV’s Battle of the Binge: Why the Wait Can Be Worth It” by James Poniewozik
- Indiana Daily Student Op-Ed “OPINION: Weekly episodes are better than binge watching” by Olivia Franklin
Now do yours. In a comment below, answer these questions about your own essay: What is your opinion essay’s thesis statement? Where did you include it? What does it do for your essay?
Feeling adventurous? Answer these same questions for anyone else’s opinion essay draft that’s posted on our site!
If you have questions about the thesis statement, or other questions about the opinion essay, please add them to your comment below (or reach out to me directly if that’s more comfortable for you).
Photo credit: “Thought Bubbles” by Krissy Venosdale via Flickr under the license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
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