According to The Writer’s Brief Handbook, a thesis is “a controlling idea.” The authors (Rosa, Eschholz and Roberts) explain that “The thesis is often expressed in one or two sentences called a thesis statement” (13). An article’s thesis statement is usually in the first or second paragraphs, after some description or discussion of the article’s context or the gaps in the discipline’s knowledge the article is addressing.

A Guide to Reading and Analyzing Academic Articles, by Amanda Graham, 1997-2012, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.