Thesis Statement Criteria
One of the graded items for your Big Mistake essay is a thesis statement.
If you review the Lecture Notes: Mastering Thesis Statements page, you see that there are some basic criteria to remember when constructing your thesis statement.
- Your thesis statement should be only one sentence long.
- Your thesis statement should introduce the main idea or claim of your essay.
- Your thesis statement should be specific, concise, and come at the end of your introduction paragraph.
Thesis Statement Template
In this section, let’s discuss a basic template to use to construct your thesis statement.
This template is presented as a guide only, to help you start constructing effective thesis statements. If you develop a thesis statement that doesn’t fit this template, that’s fine, but it’s usually worthwhile to consider the reasons for going in a different direction.
When we think about the focus of your Big Mistake, it’s clear there are two main ideas being introduced. First, clearly you’ll want to discuss your big mistake, and second (as will become clear in the weeks to come), we’ll want to discuss what was learned from the mistake. Using this information, we can combine these two big ideas into a thesis statement that will likely follow this template:
[your big mistake] + [lesson(s) you learned]
Examples Using The Thesis Statement Template
Of course you’ll need to use your own story in your essay, but here are some examples to get you thinking:
1) I lied to my best friend, then came to regret it, and that taught me the importance of being honest and valuing friendship.
2) Driving my motorcycle too fast while I was angry helped me see that I need to be less impulsive, and more careful when it comes to driving safety.
3) Getting too wrapped up in social media and failing my Algebra test made me realize I need to work harder to balance school and extracurricular activities.