Two Prongs Too Many: Thesis Statement Revision

Hello! Friendly neighborhood Writing Center here with some advice for those of you struggling to turn your stuffy five-paragraph essay into an innovative, sparkling college paper.

You probably know what a thesis statement is already: a one (or several) sentence restatement of your paper's main argument. You've probably written a lot of these, and many of them have probably been what we in the biz call "three-prong thesis statements." Here's an example:

This leads into a nice, neat five-paragraph essay. A nice, neat, boring five-paragraph essay. The image above comes from the website for a ninth-grade class, and the teacher even tells his readers that "For most high school writing, it will suffice, though more sophisticated writers learn to transcend this." (Gardner). Wait--high school writing?

Yes, the five-paragraph essay was a fine structure in ninth grade, but by your first year of college, you should be more than ready to move beyond that. So how, in Mr. Gardner's words, can you "learn to transcend" the three-prong thesis?
One way is simply to snip off two of your prongs, and expand the one you're most drawn to. One of the cardinal sins of the five-paragraph essay is its tendency to oversimplify its points. Let's imagine you were tasked with writing an analysis of this image:

Your three-prong thesis might look something like this: "This image is melancholy because of its unfinished roof, the ruined grandeur of the Roman columns, and the plants beginning to grow in the cracks." If you were sitting across from me, here at the UGA Writing Center, I would ask you which of those prongs you think has the most promise.

You'd probably point out the "ruined grandeur of the Roman columns," and I would agree. I'd then spend the next fifteen or twenty minutes asking you more about that idea. What emotions does that instill in you? What's so melancholy about ruins? Why might the builders of this folly have left it unfinished? How does the lack of symmetry change our interpretation of the building?

Answering those questions, and making whatever observations--even and especially off-the-wall-sounding observations--will help you find more to say about your newly-focused thesis. From there, you can begin the process of writing, revising, and reorganizing again.

So, to summarize:

• Find your prongs

• Pick the prong you consider the most promising and snip off the rest

• Brainstorm on your newly unified thesis, and begin writing again.

There are, of course, other methods for reforming a three-prong thesis, but when you're pressed for time, simply hacking off two prongs and forcing yourself to narrow your focus can work wonders.

(images courtesy of http://staff.camas.wednet.edu/blogs/mgardner/essays/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Erm11.JPG)