Weak Thesis Type 4:  The thesis offers personal conviction as the basis for the claim

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia treats individualism as a serious but remediable social problem.  His radical treatment of what we might now call “socialization” attempts to redefine the meaning and origin of individual identity.

Although I agree with Jeane Kirkpatrick’s argument that environmentalists and businesses should work together to ensure the ecological future of the world, the indisputable fact is that environmental considerations should always be a part of any decision that is made. 

Like conventional wisdom, personal likes and dislikes can lead inexperienced writers into knee-jerk reactions of approval or disapproval, often expressed in a moralistic tone. The writers of the problem examples above assume that their primary job is to judge their subjects or testify to their worth, not to evaluate them analytically.

Solution:  Try on other points of view honestly and dispassionately; treat your ideas as hypotheses to be tested rather than obvious truths. 

For example:

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia proposes an unworkable set of solutions to society’s problems because, like communist Russia, it suppresses individualism.

 

Although I agree with Jeane Kirkpatrick’s argument that environmentalists and businesses should work together to ensure the ecological future of the world, her argument undervalues the necessity of pressuring businesses to attend to environmental concerns that may not benefit them in the short run.

Weak Thesis Type 5:  The thesis makes an overly broad claim

Violent revolutions have had both positive and negative results for man.

Othello is a play about love and jealousy.

Overly generalized theses avoid complexity.  At their worst, as in the first three examples above, they settle for assertions broad enough to fit almost any subject and thus say nothing in particular about the subject at hand.

Solution:  Convert broad categories and generic (fits anything) claims to more specific assertions; find ways to bring out the complexity of your subject. 

For example:

Although violent revolutions begin to redress long-standing social inequities, they often do so at the cost of long-term economic dysfunction and the suffering that attends it.

Although Othello appears to attack jealousy, it also supports the skepticism of the jealous characters over the naïveté of the lovers.

Two strategies can help you write your way into a better thesis:

Specify—Replace the overly abstract terms—terms such as positive and negative (or similar and different)—with something specific; name something that is positive and something that is negative instead.

Subordinate—Rank one of the two items in the pairing underneath the other. When you subordinate, you put the most important, pressing, or revealing side of the comparison in what is known as the main clause and the less important side in what is known as the subordinate clause, introducing it with a word such as although.