How Theme Statement Can Improve Your Writing

One of the topics that my undergraduate students of Public Speaking praised as highly useful was Theme Statement Writing. The beauty of a theme statement is that it enables you to organize your thoughts and write stories, articles and speeches that hang together. Most of us never learn to organize our thoughts. Some psychologists say the problem starts in our childhood days. As children we are controlled by our emotions. So you find yourself often bubbling with ideas and stories. You may start with one idea and soon another one comes crowding in so you abandon the earlier one and start on the new. That problem persists into adulthood. and it is very common, seeing the many articles written on how to organize your thoughts.

When you use theme statement to organize your thoughts and materials, you ask yourself: What is the main idea that I want my reader to get? Write the answer to the question as clearly and as specifically as you can. Often you will be surprised that you cannot put the theme statement on paper. It’s a clear indication that your story doesn’t hang together. You should reduce it to a single idea.

Example of Theme Statement

How do you then write a theme statement? Let’s illustrate with a simple example. Let’s suppose we are writing an article on “The Four Essentials of a Direct Mail Marketing Package”. In such an article, it is safe to assume that your readers are familiar with direct mail marketing. They probably have even used it to market their products. So what is it that they want to know? They want to know what items are essential, perhaps so that they can improve their marketing campaigns or just so that they can know they are doing it right.

With this in mind, let’s write down our theme statement: “The four essentials of a direct mail marketing package are a hard hitting sales letter, a brochure, an order form and a self-addressed reply envelope.” Now I have a good theme statement. I have even the four key paragraphs that I will use in my article. (Of course, you can make many more paragraphs out of each main paragraph). My theme statement is the scaffolding upon which I can hang the many materials I have gathered when I was researching my article. I can now clearly see what does and what doesn’t fit. I shouldn’t try to hammer it in what doesn’t fit, no matter how much I love it. I should either throw it into the dustbin or keep it aside for another story idea.

As you can see, your theme statement must be a clear statement. Don’t confuse it with your main topic or the theme in your fiction writing. Theme statement is a fragment of a topic. Some people call it a “thesis statement.” Whatever you call it, the purpose is the same-to remove vagueness from your writing.

Use it and you’ll be surprised you didn’t learn to use it earlier.