The thesis statement is another marker of academic literacy. The skimpy texts of basic writers frequently lack a focus or thesis, but even those students who produce a lot of text often fail to signal to their readers what all of this text means through providing a strong statement of thesis.

A text without a thesis statement will be quickly assessed as a failure by most academic readers, not only composition teachers. Furthermore, until they have learned the concept of a central thesis, students may be at a loss to determine how to revise their texts. The thesis statement can guide their choice of what to keep and what to leave out and can function as a guide to developing introductory and concluding paragraphs, while its first cousin, the topic sentence, serves the related purpose of focusing texts and guiding revision at the paragraph level. Students generally need to use these kinds of unifying and organizing generalizations to convince teachers that they are competent writers.

Even a cursory glance at the most widely used and influential handbooks show the continued emphasis on the thesis sentence and topic sentence, despite research that has shown that professional writing often does not contain topic sentences. When asking for classroom presentations by writing center personnel, my colleagues in other disciplines most frequently mention the thesis sentence as the highest priority in their evaluation of student writing in their classes.

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