Organizing Your Thoughts and Creating Coherent Thesis Statements.

Prewriting: The first part in beginning any writing project is deciding what you are going to say about the topic you are going to write about. Prewriting strategies, such as clustering, freewriting, and brainstorming, can give you quite a bit of material. However, often students realize by the end of the process that they have a variety of opinions, ideas, and insights on the topic, but that all of those ideas don’t seem to form a coherent position.

Example: A student may be given the topic of the death penalty to write about with the basic essay question being “Should every state in America abolish the death penalty?” After doing some brainstorming, the student may have come up with the following: The death penalty is very barbaric and seems extreme. I read that even lethal injection has become painful in some executions. I also read that people sit for a long time on death row, ready to die, but the system seems to take forever to execute anyone. I know the death penalty is extreme, but what about those killers who can’t be reformed and will keep on killing people? I think maybe if the death penalty exists, it should only exist for those people.

Example: After creating that list of ideas, the student may feel more confused than ever, thinking “I want to be against the death penalty, but what about those that can’t be reformed? And what do I do with that idea about waiting forever to be executed?” However, if we examine this list and think about it a bit, we can come up with a clear, nuanced thesis statement.

Examining the Ideas: From the student’s list, the student obviously wants to take a position against the death penalty, but let’s look at two of the other ideas the student came up with: I read that even lethal injection has become painful in some executions. I also read that people sit for a long time on death row, ready to die, but the system seems to take forever to execute anyone. Looking at both of these ideas together, we can see that the student is pointing out flaws in how the death penalty is put into practice. When put this way, we can see that these two ideas can fit with the student’s stand against the death penalty.

Examining the Ideas: But what about that idea that maybe we should use the death penalty against killers who will kill again and can’t be reformed? This seems to fly in the face of the student’s idea that we should get rid of the death penalty, but what if this is just an indication that the student believes that the death penalty should be eliminated only in most circumstances but left as a last resort for very dangerous people for whom rehabilitation and longer prison sentences seem to do little? Although it may require a little more work, this means that the student may be able to qualify his or her basic claim.

Putting it Together: Now that we have an idea of how the student’s various ideas can be related together, it’s time to make the actual thesis, but to do that, we need to look at a little bit of sentence structure to find a means to do that.

A Short Sentence Structure Review: In order to put two ideas together, one option with sentence structure is to create a compound sentence. This requires that the writer join two complete sentences together with a coordinating conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so). For example, a writer could combine the sentences “I love my dog” and “he is very affectionate” by writing “I love my dog, and he’s very affectionate.” With this basic idea in mind, let’s return to writing our death penalty thesis statement.

Thesis Statement Draft: Now, let’s work on putting these ideas together. Examine the following draft thesis statement: America should improve the application of the death penalty, shortening the time prisoners spend on death row and making execution as painless as possible, but at the same time, we should reserve the death penalty only for murderers who cannot be reformed.

Thesis Statement Draft: Note that the thesis statement gets at all of our ideas. The first part of the statement gets at our desire to shorten time on death row and make executions less painful: “America should improve the application of the death penalty, shortening the time prisoners spend on death row and making execution as painless as possible…”

Thesis Statement Draft: Also note that the second part of the thesis gets at our ideas that we tend to want to eliminate the death penalty except in the case of killers who can’t be reformed. “…but at the same time, we should reserve the death penalty only for murderers who cannot be reformed.” Note that the word “but” connects our second set of ideas with the first and makes one unified thesis statement.

Thesis Statement Draft Therefore, this thesis statement makes a coherent argument out of our initial brainstorming list. The death penalty is very barbaric and seems extreme. I read that even lethal injection has become painful in some executions. I also read that people sit for a long time on death row, ready to die, but the system seems to take forever to execute anyone. I know the death penalty is extreme, but what about those killers who can’t be reformed and will keep on killing people? I think maybe if the death penalty exists, it should only exist for those people. America should improve the application of the death penalty, shortening the time prisoners spend on death row and making execution as painless as possible, but at the same time, we should reserve the death penalty only for murderers who cannot be reformed.