Here's a hammer for your thesis statement
Doctoral work will needle all of your anxieties about writing.
The semester-after-semester cycle of dread uploading final papers on the last day of finals at 11:58pm? Yes. That.
Since I couldn't afford to let it kill me, I armed myself as best as I could. More accurately, I let it throw jab after jab until I finally started getting my hands up. Out of this came a formula I developed for producing thesis statements. Strictly structuring these statements allowed my writing and my own ideas to take shape, but more importantly they broadcast these ideas instead of burying them in dense prose.
Here's the model:
In contrast to a prevailing narrative that says this, this person is actually doing this different thing by this method/philosophy/approach/practice.
Show People Two Different Things
The mechanism of the argument in the above model is simple: you establish the conventional account and challenge it with some new information or angle. Then you justify that somehow. But the main point is to establish that there are two different things— your story and then everything else— and show that plainly to the reader. Hold out both hands. Say ‘Here is One Thing,’ now ‘Here is Another Thing.’
Here is one of my approved thesis sentences as an example:
While we traditionally view the ars nova’s notational advances as practical achievements, the movement effectively emerged and operated as an esoteric knowledge system— outside both the ars vetus of the church and the Aristotelian trend within the university— based on a conceptual blending that united speculativa and practica and emancipated musical knowledge from its deployment toward traditional theo-philosophical ends.
This is a good example because maybe you aren't too aware of all the particulars around the history of medieval musical notation. But the difference between my proposal and the conventional narrative comes through: that medieval notation is not merely a technical upgrade of musical writing but an expression of a radical new philosophy of music.
Early drafts of this paper read like literature reviews, hopscotching facts and quotes in chronological sequence. My own opinions on the subjects were only sometimes glanced, mostly hidden. Otherwise, nonexistent.
Writing is Exhausting
Research is exhausting. Writing is exhausting.
But when academic writing confuses or blurs the distinction between ideas with shades of grey, papers demonstrate no purpose. They are just an accounting, another block added to the stack of scholarship. When reading my early drafts of what would become mountainous piles of research, I'm sure my adviser felt it wasn't clear which ideas were wholly mine, which were informed by my source material, which were simply statements of fact, or why anybody should care. This was because none of that was clear in my own mind.
Maybe you are concerned about building straw men. Ultimately it matters less that your introduction of a "conventional account"— a that to your this— is strictly accurate and more that it establishes some contrast between others' ideas and your own. Besides, it's even better to construct a thesis which allows for a strong refutatio, that essential component of classical rhetoric during which one details the strongest counterarguments to the premise of their own.
Even if the language you employ is completely different, any argument should be able to fit into this structure. But here are some phrases you might consider:
Some establishing phrases: While, In contrast to, Although...
Some challenging phrases: actually, in reality, effectively...
Some justifying phrases: by, based on, because...