Finding a Controlling Idea

Like any good military strategist, the essayist needs to have an overall battle plan in order to achieve the objective: a coherent and interesting essay or report on an assigned or chosen topic. A piece of writing, whether it be a brief argumentative essay in English or philosophy or an involved work of historical analysis, needs to have an overarching purpose or point that it is pursuing. When you come to formulate this point in your introduction it is called a thesis statement. But as you begin to write you may not be completely clear on what you are setting out to prove. You may discover something along the way that alters your thinking or that refines your argument to some extent. To focus your research and thinking from the outset, however, you need to have a controlling idea, the big idea that links together the parts of your discussion. Establishing your controlling idea from the outset of your research and drafting keeps you focussed and efficient.

Usually when you are given a writing assignment for a course you have some idea about the subject. Essay and research questions in academic study are logically derived from course materials. Or, if they cause you to look beyond the specific subject matter you are studying, you are usually asked to apply the knowledge, theories, principles, or forms of reasoning that that you have been instructed in. So, while you may know little about your specific research subject or problem at the beginning, you likely have enough to go on to enable you to formulate a provisional definition of your writing project. This definition, which will likely evolve as you research and write, is called your controlling idea.

Some student writers may have been taught that it is important first to formulate a thesis statement and then to proceed to develop an essay outline. This may be well and good when you are completely familiar with your research material, know exactly what you want to say, and have a sense of how to organize and develop your essay. This may be the case if you are writing a paper that asks you simply to summarize some part of the course content. But if you are researching a topic about which you are only somewhat familiar, your exploration of your subject can be limited early on by constructing too rigid a thesis statement. As you research and think about a subject, your thinking evolves and expands. Your first conception of the writing project may have been too narrow. You need to be open to the new possibilities of argument and frontiers of interest that you may encounter. The evolutionary form of a controlling idea helps to make this possible.

Unlike the fixed and formulated thesis statement, the controlling idea develops gradually as you work your way through the research and writing process. Novelist E.M. Forster's observation about the relation between writing and thinking offers a universal truth in this regard: "How do I know what I think until I see what I have to say?" And so, the controlling idea defines the path of your reasoning and discovery, leading you along a selected trail of enquiry until you truly see what you have to say about the subject you are writing on.

Formulating a Controlling Idea