Harvard College Writing Center
1
Thesis
Your thesis is the central claim in your essay—your main insight or idea about your
source or topic. Your thesis should appear early in an academic essay, followed by a
logically constructed argument that supports this central claim. A strong thesis is
arguable, which means a thoughtful reader could disagree with it and therefore needs
your careful analysis of the evidence to understand how you arrived at this claim. You
arrive at your thesis by examining and analyzing the evidence available to you, which
might be text or other types of source material.
A thesis will generally respond to an
analytical question or pose a solution to a problem
that you have framed for your readers (and for yourself). When you frame that question
or problem for your readers, you are telling them
what is at stake in your argument—
why your question matters and why they should care about the answer
. If you can
explain to your readers why a question or problem is worth addressing, then they will
understand why it’s worth reading an essay that develops your thesis—and you will
understand why it’s worth writing that essay.
A strong thesis will be arguable rather than descriptive, and it will be the right scope
for the essay you are writing. If your thesis is descriptive, then you will not need to
convince your readers of anything—you will be naming or summarizing something
your readers can already see for themselves. If your thesis is too narrow, you won’t be
able to explore your topic in enough depth to say something interesting about it. If your
thesis is too broad, you may not be able to support it with evidence from the available
sources.
When you are writing an essay for a course assignment, you should make sure you
understand what type of claim you are being asked to make. Many of your assignments
will be asking you to make analytical claims, which are based on interpretation of
facts, data, or sources.
Some of your assignments may ask you to make normative claims. Normative claims
are claims of value or evaluation rather than fact—claims about how things should be
rather than how they are. A normative claim makes the case for the importance of
something, the action that should be taken, or the way the world should be. When you
are asked to write a policy memo, a proposal, or an essay based on your own opinion,
you will be making normative claims.
