{"id":99,"date":"2020-02-25T23:15:25","date_gmt":"2020-02-26T04:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/advancedenglish\/chapter\/find-the-thesis\/"},"modified":"2021-08-06T15:08:19","modified_gmt":"2021-08-06T19:08:19","slug":"find-the-thesis","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/advancedenglish\/chapter\/find-the-thesis\/","title":{"raw":"Creating Your Thesis","rendered":"Creating Your Thesis"},"content":{"raw":"In the Prewriting stage, you chose one idea (or closely related group of ideas) out of all of your possible ideas to focus on.\r\n\r\nYou may have already created a topic sentence\/thesis statement in the outlining<\/a> section of this text. If not, now is the time to develop a working thesis to guide your drafting process.\r\n

What Is a Working Thesis?<\/h1>\r\nA thesis is the controlling idea of a text (often an arguable idea\u2014you will learn more about this in a bit). Depending on the type of text you are creating, all of the discussion in that text will serve to develop, explore multiple angles of, and\/or support that thesis.\r\n\r\nBut how can we know, before getting any of the paper written, exactly what thesis the sources we find and the conversations we have will support? Often, we can\u2019t. The closest we can get in these cases is a working thesis, which is a best guess at what the thesis is likely to be based on the information we are working with at this time. The main idea of it may not change, but the specifics are probably going to be tweaked a bit as you complete a draft and do research.\r\n\r\nSo, let\u2019s look at one of the examples from \u201cGathering Ideas<\/a>\u201d from the \"Prewriting\u2014Gathering Ideas\" section of this book: the cluster about the broad central idea of danger. If the main idea is \u201cdanger,\u201d maybe the conversation you decide you want to have about it after clustering is that sometimes people step into danger intentionally in order to prove ourselves in some way. Next, you might make a list of possible thesis statements. For the sake of example, let\u2019s say this is for an assignment in response to the film The Hunger Games<\/em>. Some thesis statements that fit this situation might look like this:\r\n