Distinguish an arguable analytical thesis from a plot summary or an observation, and draft a thesis specific enough to be provable with textual evidence.
An analytical essay's thesis is not a summary of what happens and not a vague observation about a topic -- it is a specific, arguable claim about how or why a text produces a particular effect or meaning, one that a reasonable reader could push back on and that only fits the text actually being discussed. "Beowulf is about heroism" is a topic, not a thesis; it could describe hundreds of texts and asks nothing of the reader to accept or reject. "The dragon episode redefines Beowulf's heroism as inseparable from mortality, since the poem insists a hero's greatest legacy is still bound to an ordinary human death" is a thesis: specific, arguable, and tied to evidence only this poem could supply.
A reliable test, familiar from earlier analytical writing, still applies at this more advanced level: could this exact sentence be proven false by evidence from the text, or does it float above the text entirely? A thesis that could not possibly be disproven by anything in the work is usually still a topic in disguise. Equally important at the college-prep level is scope: a thesis that promises to prove too much, three unrelated claims about a whole novel, usually proves none of them well in the space of one essay, while a thesis narrowed to one specific, well-chosen claim can be developed with real depth.
Mastery looks like: They can distinguish a topic from a thesis using the falsifiability test and can narrow an overly broad, multi-part thesis into one specific, defensible claim.
Common stumbles: Writing a thesis so general it could describe almost any text; stacking multiple unrelated claims into one thesis instead of narrowing to the strongest single claim.
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