Writing A Thesis Statement

To begin with, I have always considered myself an adept writer, however reading literature has never been an interest of mine until taking Composition II. For instance, most of the literature I have read has been required for one class or another. Furthermore, when I do pick up a book to read, I want to immerse myself into the story and momentarily lose touch with the reality around me along with possibly gaining a new viewpoint. On the other hand, when I read a book, this ability to immerse myself is lost when I am instructed to; analyze the characters, dissect the author’s writing elements, as well as consider the context and how it relates to another book or life’s issues. Therefore, I often find myself staring at my computer screen while

Even though, I understand the concept behind the development of a thesis statement, I still struggle with the development of this statement as a clear and concise judgement. Additionally, my writing tends to be overly descriptive of the issue or the idea I want to address within my essay, therefore not resulting in a clear and concise thesis statement. For example, when I received my critique for my comparative literature essay, my thesis statement was underdeveloped and lacked specificity. Thus, I further developed my thesis statement for this essay to include more specificity as well as to be more clear and concise in my judgement. For the most part, there is great difficulty and frustration in the process of writing a literary essay, which I am not familiar, nor comfortable with. Moreover, condensing the information from research in the writing process is a struggle for me, on the other hand, attaining information by way of research is not a struggle for me. Therefore, this difficulty with condensing information from research adds to the difficulty with the formation of a proper thesis statement. For instance, when I gathered the information from my research regarding my comparative literature essay, I struggled with how to condense the information given the quantity, but also with the

Therefore, the papers written for our class were all thesis-based, which requires an effective thesis and supporting the rest of the paragraphs of the paper by including relevant topic sentences for each paragraph. For example, my ability to maintain an organized paper while writing the setting, plot, and narration essay was quite a struggle; there were times during this process I considered not writing the paper. Specifically, how to wrap my head around writing the essay without talking about the protagonist, Buck and how his character developed was extremely challenging. Therefore, my rough draft submitted for peer review was structured quite differently than the final draft turned in for grading given my continual reading of the rough draft where I found inadequate organization of my ideas. To explain, I was trying to write first about setting, then plot, and finally narration while attempting to keep the essay written chronologically with the storyline. I finally realized how big of a mistake this was and I went for a nearly complete restructuring of the entire paper with more of the focus on how London used each element to support the other. In addition, I disregarded the timeline of the story, instead focusing on examples and evidence to support my views of London’s writing