You may start a term paper or a well researched essay with a thesis statement. A thesis is a statement of what you think is the truth about a particular subject and will dictate the form that your argument takes.

If you've been studying the work of Dickens and you have been asked to write a paper about Oliver Twist, you might say something like, "Oliver Twist was orphaned and lived as a pickpocket with a gang of thieves but in the end he is found by members of his family and taken away from that life". While this might be the premise of the book on the one hand, it might also be what you believe to be the case from you reading the story.

When you undertake postgraduate study, you would have to formulate a thesis statement, but it's bound to be more complicated than the example given above, especially if it's in a course of doctoral study. Whatever the case, you will need to produce some sort of thesis statement at the start of your PhD or for your term paper.

A good thesis will tell the readers what they're about to read in a nutshell. Using this statement at the beginning of term papers and essays is a way of keeping your mind on the argument and the points that you are making. People don't always write a thesis based on research they have already done; sometimes the statement comes first and then the student seeks out those texts that will help him or her to make their argument.

If you can make the thesis sum up your argument in a nutshell, it should make the rest of your writing of a term paper much easier because it has helped you focus on what is the central idea of your paper. You either prove or disprove your thesis statement with the research that you do and the argument you construct from that research.

At some point, usually in the concluding paragraphs of your paper you will need to defend your thesis and say why you have chosen one point of view over another.

Whatever you write about, you need to keep the reader in mind. Readers can either have their attention engaged by your writing or they can feel turned off by it right from the start. You should write as though you are telling a story that the person has not heard before. This means that your argument should be concise and should lead them to what may appear to be the only proper conclusion to that story.

Your professor needs to see that you have used the proper sources to build and defend the argument that is in your thesis. He or she is the most important reader of all because they're the person that will be grading your work and who can accept or reject your thesis statement.

A thesis statement should be your guide in writing a paper and you should know and understand it well enough to defend that position in your written argument.