…During my sophomore year at high school I was assigned to write an argumentative essay on any topic. I showed the first draft of the essay to my teacher. He read it carefully and then said, “This essay is not what I want.” I felt disappointed and angry at the same time. What’s wrong with my essay? Why didn’t he explain?
I came home and decided to read it again. The first thing that I noticed was the introduction that didn’t catch attention of the readers. My essay was about gender inequalities and employment. I started with describing historical events related to gender issues and illustrating some facts which did not explain the topic of my essay. Therefore, I revised the introductory paragraph of the essay providing striking statistics about progression of gender inequalities for certain job positions. The introduction became interesting to read because the facts in the introductory part of my essay were taken from sources which were difficult to access and not actively “advertised”. Because of the uniqueness of the introduction readers were easily involved into the process of reading the essay; their desire was driven by their curiosity in further development of my arguments.
However, my introduction was still not perfect. The next element that I had to revise was my thesis statement. Thesis helps a reader to focus on the main point that a writer is going to prove by his/her essay. It may seem easy because before writing an essay you record your central idea immediately and then collect information and build your writing process in accordance with the main idea. Nevertheless, the thesis statement that you have in your mind may not be persuasive in written form. It is essential to remember that your thesis statement is not a summary of the essay that you were assigned to write. On the contrary, it is your standpoint on the chosen topic.
Thus, it should include your own opinion, the opposite point of view and the summary of supportive facts which will be presented further in the essay. The question is how to fit all those elements into one sentence of your thesis statement. It may take quite a long time. However, if you manage to write strong thesis statement you’ll succeed in presenting the complex idea of your essay using simple text. It does not mean using simple vocabulary; it rather means developing more persuasive arguments and making your essay easier to read. The thesis statement in my essay was: “According to sociological research, in multinational companies women have fewer opportunities than men to be hired for managerial positions.”
I thought it was a perfect thesis statement; however, it was absolutely unacceptable. To begin with, the thesis statement of my essay was biased because it did not reflect the point of view of the opposite party. Besides, the main points which support the idea of the essay were not summarized in the thesis statement. Thus, I revised the thesis sentence and wrote the following:
“Even though some researchers believe that the new perception of the role of women in modern society established equal opportunities for men and women, psychological indicators and sociological findings demonstrate that women have fewer opportunities to be hired for managerial positions in multinational companies.”
At last I finished my work on the thesis statement! The writing process went smoothly. I already had the structure of the essay in my head. First, I recorded the first sentences which explained the central idea of each paragraph in the main body of the essay. Later I reorganized my notes which I took while reading useful literature on my topic and supplied each paragraph with the evidence that supported my arguments.
In the conclusion, I summarized the key points and restated the thesis. I showed the second draft to my teacher and his only comment was, “I’m glad that you learnt how to write an essay.”…
Probably this story will remind you your personal experience of learning how to write essays. The story is interesting because this student discovered himself those mistakes that he made while writing the first draft of his essay. His knowledge came from practice. He was able to write a good essay but he would spend less time on his improvement if he did research and used online guides on writing essays.
