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gjm comments on When considering incentives, consider the incentives of all parties - Less Wrong
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I'm puzzled as to why people think formulaic writing is good writing.
Thesis statements tell the reader whether they agree with the work or not in advance. I disagree firmly with their use, as they encourage a lazy style of reading in which you decide before you begin reading whether or not you're going to discard the evidence before you, or consider it.
They enable a lazy style of reading. They also enable the reverse: a style of reading where the reader knows ahead of time that certain of their buttons are about to be pushed, and takes measures in advance to minimize the effect.
For my part, I find both helpful. Sometimes it's clear that something is unlikely to be worth my time to read because it's entirely based on premises I don't accept. Sometimes it's clear that while the author's position is very different from mine, they have interesting things to say that I might find helpful. Sometimes their position is very different from mine and I read on in the hope that if I'm wrong I can be corrected. All of these require different attitudes while reading.
(Of course one can do without. But the more mental effort the author kindly saves me from expending in figuring out whether their piece is worth reading, whether I need to be reading it with an eye to revising my most deeply held beliefs, etc., etc., the more I can give to the actual content of what they've written.)
You find it helpful for the following cases: 1.) You're not going to agree no matter what evidence is presented, so it's not worth reading their evidence. 2.) They might have interesting things to say. 3.) They might be right, and you might be wrong.
The issue, of course, is that you can't actually distinguish between these three cases from the thesis statement; a properly-constructed thesis statement offers no information to actually tell you which attitude you should come into reading the work with, it only states what conclusion the body of evidence reaches.
Again, I am not concerned solely with thesis statements as such, but with the practice of beginning an article with an indication of where it's headed. Something that merely says what the conclusion is going to be, indeed, is unlikely to help much with distinguishing 1,2,3; but something that does a better job of indicating what's ahead may do much better.
Suppose, for instance, I am interested in some question about the morality of abortion in certain circumstances, and suppose my current opinion is that it's unproblematic. Article One begins "I shall argue that abortion is in all cases unbiblical and contrary to the traditions of the church". That might be a very useful article for Christians, but it's unlikely to offer me any useful guidance in thinking about abortion if I am not among their number; I reject some of their key premises and this article is unlikely to be justifying them. Article Two begins "The purpose of this article is to argue against abortion in circumstances X, not on the usual grounds that Y but because of the often-neglected Z". I've thought a bit about Z before and decided that it doesn't actually affect my opinions about abortion which are dominated by other considerations P,Q,R; but it hadn't previously occurred to me that Z is the case in circumstances X, so it might be interesting to read the article. Article Three begins "Abortion is widely held to be permissible in circumstances X because P, Q, and R; I shall argue that this is a mistake because P and Q don't actually hold and R is irrelevant because S." This speaks directly to my reasons for holding the position I do; if there are other indications that the author is intelligent and sensible, they may have compelling arguments and persuade me to rethink.
I'll merely point at the title, which says exactly what the article is about and what it is conveying.