After you have read a few good books or articles on your topic and have taken a sufficient amount of notes, the focus of your paper should become a bit clearer to you.  You are now ready to begin the process of organizing your thoughts in preparation for writing your research paper.

 

Thesis Statement

A thesis statement is not the same as a topic. A topic is the area upon which you will do your research; a thesis statement is the particular slant (position, point of view) that you are going to take on your topic.

When you settled on a topic, there was a problem or issue that interested you in some way. Your thesis statement is your particular answer to that problem, your spin on that issue.

Let’s pretend that you have decided to do your paper on euthanasia. After some deliberation, you eventually narrowed down the area of your research to an investigation of active, voluntary euthanasia and finally settled on the topic of physician-assisted suicide. Your thesis statement should clearly and decisively specify your position on this topic. An acceptable thesis statement for a paper like this might be:

(1) Physician-assisted suicide is always immoral since it violates both the physician’s oath as well as the patients duty to preserve his own life.

(2) Since it is founded upon the voluntary consent of the patient, physician-assisted suicide must be viewed as morally acceptable.

(3) Physician-assisted suicide is acceptable only under the following specific conditions:...

As you can see from the above examples, your thesis statement should be concise (1-2 sentences), decisive (take a stand, damn it!), and should encapsulate the position of your entire paper.

The development of a strong thesis is vital for the creation of an interesting paper. Nothing is more frustrating for a reader than not being able to understand where a writer is coming from because that writer is confused or just plain wish-washy. You thesis statement is your opportunity to make your position clear even before you begin writing your paper.

Your Title

Like your thesis statement, your title represents an opportunity to tell readers from the onset what the "unique" contribution that you are making to your topic. It is also an opportunity to lure your reader into you paper before he even begins reading. A fascinating title makes an instructor want to read your paper, even though he may have twenty others to get though that very night. As the following examples indicate, a very boring title can be turned into an interesting one if you take the time to try to be a bit creative:

Boring: "Hobbes and Spinoza on Human Rights"

Interesting: "Alternative Perspectives on Human Rights: Hobbes and Spinoza on Rights as Power"

Boring: "Kierkegaard’s Use of Socrates in his Pseudonymous Works"

Interesting: "Kierkegaard’s Socrates: Leaping Past the Reasonable"

Boring: "Cicero’s Adoption of Stoicism"

Interesting: "A Tale of Two Ciceros: Searching for the Stoic Cicero"

Boring: "Augustine on Moral Order"

Interesting: "Singing a Song of Degrees: Augustine on the Harmony of Moral Order."

 

 

Creating a Working Outline 

Once you have your thesis statement written and you have complied a preliminary collection of notes, you probably will want to create a very general working outline to help determine the direction of your paper. Your working outline need not be more than a few lines, and should indicate the major subdivisions of your paper. 

Let’s pretend for a moment that the topic of your paper is on Kierkegaard’s use of the figure of Socrates in his philosophical writings. Your working title is "Kierkegaard’s Socrates: Leaping Past the Reasonable." Your thesis for this paper might be something like the following: "In such pseudonymous works as The Sickness unto Death and The Philosophical Fragments Kierkegaard uses Socrates to represent a rationally based mode of religiousness. In attacking Socrates he is actually attempting to substitute this philosophical model of religiousness with a more paradoxically grounded—and hence more distinctively Christian—model."

Your working outline for such a paper might look something like this:

    More Information about Outlines