Developing Your Thesis
Developing Your Thesis
Developing Your Thesis
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you are going to have three important points to cover, and that these points will appear in a certain order. If you suggest a particular ordering principle and then abandon it, the reader will feel betrayed, irritated, and confused.
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4. Add a group of words summarizing your key ideas EXAMPLE: Because it is inconvenient, unhealthy, and provide only temporary weight loss. 5. Recognize the opposition EXAMPLE: Although it does provide quick weight loss. 6. Call upon editing to put it all together EXAMPLE: Although it does provide quick weight loss, the Beverly Hills Diet is inadvisable for the typical college student because it is inconvenient, unhealthy, and provides only temporary weight loss.
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to your argument in the first place. No matter what discipline you are working in, you came to your idea by way of certain observations. For example, perhaps you have noticed in a History of Education course that female college students around the turn of the century seem very often to write about the idea of service to the community. How did you come to that observation? What did you observe first? And, more importantly, how did you go about exploring the significance of this observation? Did you investigate other college documents to see if the value of service was explicitly stated there? Or was this value implied in course descriptions, extra curricular possibilities, and so forth? Reconstruct for yourself how you came to your observations, and use this to help you to create a coherent introduction and thesis. 3. A good working thesis is your best friend. Those writers who understand the concept of "working thesis" are way ahead of the game. A "working thesis" is a thesis that works for you, helping you to see where your ideas are going. Many students keep their thesis sentence in front of them at all times to help them to control the direction of their argument. But what happens when you stumble onto an idea that your thesis isn't prepared for? Or, more important, what happens when you think everything is going well in your paper and suddenly you arrive at a block? Always return to your working thesis, and give it a critical once-over. You may find that the block in your writing process is related to some limitation in your thesis. Or you may find that hidden somewhere in that working thesis is the germ of an even better idea. Stay in conversation with your thesis throughout the writing process. You'll be surprised at what you can learn from it.
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their insistence that emotions be revealed. You think that you have a good idea for a thesis sentence, and so you give it a go: "In X's novel , the characters' seemingly insignificant use of lipstick in fact points to one of the novel's larger themes: the masking and unmasking of the self." This sentence does mirror for the reader your own process of discovery: it begins with an observation that a seemingly insignificant event has meaning(s) in the novel, and then it classifies those meanings into two categories. In other words, some of your logic is indeed present in the thesis as you've written it. You'll notice that I've said "some of your logic." It's important to take a second look at this thesis to see what it is that's been left out. Put yourself in the place of the reader. What does this thesis sentence tell you about the structure of the argument to come? Well, as a potential reader I would expect that first, the writer will provide evidence that lipstick is indeed an important symbol in this novel. Second, I would expect the writer to argue that lipstick signifies a character's desire to mask herself (a common observation). Finally, I would expect the writer to show me how, exactly, lipstick is used to reveal the self. Now ask yourself what this thesis doesn't tell the reader about the argument to come. We understand as readers that this paper is going to be about the masking and unmasking of the self. We understand (because it is common knowledge) that lipstick can be used to create a mask. But how, precisely, does lipstick unmask the self? Here you seem to be pointing to some uncommon use of lipstick, but you haven't even hinted at what that "uncommon use" is, or why it's important. Look closely at your thesis and ask yourself this hard question: Does my thesis give my reader a sense of the real argument to come? In this case, it doesn't. However, this doesn't mean that the thesis sentence is useless. In fact, even though this thesis doesn't provide the reader with a very good "map" of the essay, it does help you, the writer, to see the overall structure of your argument. In other words, it's a good working thesis sentence for your paper.
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Revising your working thesis at this juncture could help you to clarify for yourself the direction of your argument. Don't be afraid to revise! In fact, the most important quality of a working thesis sentence is its flexibility. A working thesis needs to keep up with your thinking. It needs to accommodate what you learn as you go along. Revising the Working Thesis Let's return now to our in-progress thesis: "In X's novel, the characters' seemingly insignificant use of lipstick in fact points to one of the novel's larger themes: the masking and unmasking of the self." Perhaps this thesis served you well as you were writing the first couple of pages of your paper, but now that you are into the meat of the matter, you are stuck. How, exactly, is the writer using lipstick and masks to reveal character? And what, precisely, is his point in doing so? It's at this juncture that you'll probably return to your thesis and discover a) what it doesn't say, and b) what it needs to say. We've already determined that the sentence doesn't really address the most arguable - and interesting - aspect of this argument. Now it's time to ask yourself why this hasn't been addressed. Perhaps you, the writer, haven't yet articulated this part of the argument for yourself? Is this why the thesis (and with it, the paper) seems to trail off? At this point you should stop drafting the paper and return to the text. Read a bit. Brainstorm a bit. Write another discovery draft. Read a bit more. Ohmygosh! Here is something interesting. You've found a passage in which the writer talks about how the lipstick left behind on a lover's shirt "drew a map for his wife into the dark lands of his infidelities." And you've found another passage in which the jilted lover's bright orange lipstick was "like a road sign, guiding her betrayer to the heart of her pain." In these two passages you see the writer addressing another function of lipstick: that women use it to draw a kind of map. You look for other lipstick examples that might shed more light on the idea of mapping, and you find them. Even better, you discover that all of these examples have something to do with betrayal, guilt, and shame. In the end, you conclude that lipstick is not being used in this novel just to mask and unmask. Women also use lipstick to map. The two are in fact linked: 1. Lipstick masks by concealing real feelings (most often feelings of betrayal, guilt, and shame). 2. Lipstick masks, but in the process reveals or creates a new persona, one who overcomes the feelings of betrayal, guilt, and shame. 3. The author also uses the act of putting on lipstick as a metaphor for mapping. These maps might conceal - that is, they might serve to detour the observer from discovering (or arriving at) the woman's feelings of betrayal, or 4. They might reveal. First, lipstick might draw a map to the truth about a betrayal, as they do for the betrayed wife in the novel. And second, lipstick might be seen as a tool with which a woman maps herself, drawing new borders, re-imagining her own inner landscapes, and re-routing her own destiny. This idea is very complicated. How do you make a thesis out of this? Your first try is bound to be clumsy. You need to find a way of putting together all of your important ideas - lipsticks, masks, maps, concealing, revealing, betrayal - into one sentence. Can it be done? Maybe; maybe not. Let's try:
Courtesy the Odegaard Writing & Research Center http://www.depts.washington.edu/owrc Adapted from www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/ac_paper/develop.shtml
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While lipstick is used in X's novel to conceal feelings of betrayal, it is also used to reveal the betrayal itself, in that lipstick both masks and maps betrayal, at first allowing women to hide themselves, but later providing them with the possibility to create new selves, and to re-route their lives. Does this sentence work? Revising Your Thesis For Eloquence Clearly not. For one thing, it is simply too long. You are putting too much information into one sentence. Sometimes writers fail to understand that their argument might best be expressed in a couple of sentences (with one sentence providing background information and the second serving as the thesis). Note the difference such a change would make: While lipstick is used in X's novel to conceal feelings of betrayal, it is also used to reveal the betrayal itself. Accordingly, lipstick both masks and maps betrayal in this novel, initially allowing women to hide themselves, but later providing them with the possibility to create new selves, and to re-route their lives. Better? Sure, but it could be better still. You will, of course, want to play with your thesis sentence until it is strong enough to present your complex argument, and clear enough to guide your reader through your paper. But even more than this, you will want to write a thesis sentence that evokes something in the reader. You will want to use language that has some power; you will want to structure the sentence so that it has some "oomph." Pay attention to diction, to syntax, to nuance, and to tone. In short, write a good sentence. Understand that you can revise the thesis sentence above in a number of ways. Ask yourself: Is my argument clear? Does it present the logic and the structure of my paper? Does it emphasize the points I want to emphasize?
Perhaps in the end you decide that the previous sentence seems to make masking and mapping of equal importance to this paper. You've decided that mapping is the more original, stronger idea. So you revise once more, for emphasis. Consider this, then, our final thesis sentence (note how the complete argument now relies on the interaction between two introductory sentences and the thesis statement itself): While at first it might appear that lipstick is being used merely to hide the characters' feelings of betrayal, a closer look reveals that its most essential use is actually to map the path to the betrayal itself. By using lipstick as the signposts, betrayal can be discovered and navigated. As a result, characters are able to re-draw the borders of their relationships, and to re-route the course of their lives. Perfect!
Courtesy the Odegaard Writing & Research Center http://www.depts.washington.edu/owrc Adapted from www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/ac_paper/develop.shtml