Building a Thesis Statement Beats Finding a Topic to Write About

A painless way to find something to write about is to grab the first topic that comes to your mind and brainstorm assertions about it. The combination of a topic and an assertion about that topic creates a thesis statement.

Your topic need not be vitally important. You do not even have to have an original perspective on the topic. All you need is find something that interests you enough that you can spend an hour or two working with it.

You can easily make your own thesis builder with a piece of ruled paper and a pencil. Put a vertical line down a piece of paper. Write your topic to the left of the line. To the right of the line, write an assertion about the topic. The topic and the assertion together should read as a complete sentence. For example, to the topic "hot weather" you could add the assertion "brings out the worse in people." That topic and assertion could become the thesis statement for an essay.

Identify other potential thesis statements by brainstorming other assertions about your topic. Do not take time to evaluate how good an assertion is. Just get ideas down. Force yourself to work fast. You may want to set a timer for five minutes so you are not tempted to dawdle.

As you brainstorm, you may get an idea for a slightly different topic. For example, instead of writing about hot weather, you may want to assert something about working outdoors in hot weather or being in summer school in hot weather. That shows your brainstorming is shaking ideas loose. Be sure you write down your modified topic as well as the assertion about it.

When you have exhausted your ideas or the timer rings, look to see if any of the potential thesis statements looks like one on which you can write in the time you have. You may have a couple that are too small or too silly. You may have some would require too much research for the time you have. However, with a little luck, you will have at least one that is suitable for your assignment.

If the thesis builder does not produce a suitable thesis first time around, try brainstorming on a second topic for another five minutes. In 10 minutes, you are almost sure to find something better to write on by this method than by hours of unfocused brainstorming.

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