How to Write a TOEFL Essay Thesis Statement

PAGE 4 OF 5

Strong thesis statements

Now that we've seen a few examples of both good thesis statements and bad thesis statements, the next question is this: how can we write a great thesis statement? Let's start with a thesis statement that we already know is good:

Police officers should not carry guns.

This is a good thesis statement, but it's not a great one. We can improve it by making the language stronger. Do this by using stronger language, words such as no or never. Here's what it looks like when we've made our improvements:

Police officers should never carry guns.

We could also say something like this:

No police officer should ever carry a gun.

If our thesis statement is a positive sentence, we can strengthen the language with a word like always. Here's an example:

Police officers should always carry guns.

Next we'll look at other ways of strengthening our the thesis statement.