HIST 3850 Lecture Notes - George Braziller, Canadian Historical Review, Electronic Journal
Document Summary
In writing your essays, you will earn marks for following these guidelines: thesis and organization. A good essay has one main argument, called a thesis, and a solid organization to support the argument. Make sure every essay you write makes a clear argument on a point that is debatable: formulating the thesis. The thesis is the organizing argument for your paper. As you research your topic, you will come up with a number of tentative ideas about your subject. At first, your ideas and assertions may seem random and unconnected. But eventually they will point toward a larger conclusion. This broad, encompassing idea is your composition"s central argument. It links up all the smaller ideas and unifies the essay. All paragraphs and sentences in your paper must help advance this message. It is important to remember that a statement of the paper"s purpose is not the same as a thesis.