Do you read the newspaper? When you scan a newspaper for items that interest you, the first thing you read is the title (e.g. "Homicide Victims Rarely Talk to Police" is bound to get your attention!). If the title indicates that the article is interesting, you then proceed to read the first paragraph. Typically, you read the first paragraph with a question in your mind: "Is this interesting, as I thought it might be?" You want to know what the article is about. And if that first paragraph does not tell you what the rest is about, you would be forgiven if you read no further, as obviously it is a badly written article anyway!

A scholarly essay, just like a newspaper article, needs to say in some meaningful sense what the essay is about in the first paragraph. Every good scholarly work will start by writing what is considered the thesis statement. A thesis statement is really a statement of the question the essay answers. In a sense, 'thesis' is a misleading term; more often than not the question statement is a hypothesis in a strictly scientific-jargon sense (i.e. is not proven true). Readers want the answer to their question, "what is the question this essay is asking?".

Where that thesis statement occurs in your essay is crucial. It should appear in the first or second line, or at the very least, within the first paragraph. It should not be buried in text, and it should be presented as overtly as possible.

What all too frequently occurs, however, is a writer will start out her or his essay writing background information to establish the reason they are asking their thesis statement question. They read a bit like a fairy tale: "A long time ago, in a far off land, there lived a student of Technology, Society, and Culture...". What such writers are doing is they are retracing the path by which they came to their thesis question. And, more often than not, it is either not interesting or needs to be relegated to a labelled section such as "Historical Background". If you need to write such background material before you can arrive at your thesis statement, do so, and then either throw out the unnecessary prologue, or find a better place in your essay in which it belongs.

Your Introduction will generally be longer than just the statement of your thesis. Good introductions provide a brief map of where the essay is going. It is a good practice to state the key factors you are to examine, and the key factors are often the same subtopics you identify as subheadings in the body of your essay. The introduction section for a 5,000-word paper would probably be only two or three paragraphs long.

Once you have established your thesis statement, a good practice is to re-state that statement (stylistically it is better not to do it in the exact same words) in some form whenever you present a new idea, and say overtly just how or why your new idea is related to that statement. In a sense, your thesis statement becomes the conceptual 'glue' that holds your entire paper together. You do not want your reader stopping and asking herself or himself, "why is the author telling me this?" You need to ensure that she or he knows why, and you do so by tying it to the central thesis.

 

What are the pros and cons of learning online from an individual's and society's perspectives?