Great - excellent question. Well, if I remember those office hours correctly enough, I said something to the effect that a thesis states your argument. It doesn't merely tell the reader what you're going to do in the paper (e.g. "In this paper I will compare Nietzsche and Stevens"), it tells the reader what you're going to say in the paper (i.e. "While Stevens' poems seem to endorse Nietzsche's idea that language is always only metaphoric, in fact Stevens' choice of punctuation shows that he does believe in a fundamental, knowable reality").
Another way to say this is that the thesis tells the reader where he or she will be at the end of paper. I sometimes like to think of a thesis as pointing out a flag you've planted far in the distance, at the paper's end. The thesis says something like "You see that flag way at the end? I know it's not too clear from here, but that's where this path leads, and by the end of the paper you'll be able to see it clearly." It's a way of letting the reader know where you'll be going, what your paper will have proved by its end.
This should also mean that not only should your thesis be an argument, it should be interesting. After all, the thesis tips your cards a bit, giving the reader a sense of what he or she will be learning by the end of the paper. A good thesis lures the reader in, encouraging her or him to keep reading, since he or she wants to see how the story turns out, or how you'll be making that argument, or what that argument will finally mean.
Which, if you think about it, also means that your final thesis (the one that is in the paper you actually turn in to us) is something you'll probably write after you've written most of your paper. When you first start writing, you can't know exactly what you'll be arguing. This is because you likely haven't looked at your evidence enough! A great strategy (it's the one that I use), is to start with a working thesis, that perhaps tells you as you write where you think you'll be going. But after you've written a draft or two, you'll probably see that where you actually ended up isn't quite where you thought you would. So you then go back and modify your working thesis to reflect what your paper is actually arguing.
So, as you can see, though the thesis comes at the beginning of the paper, it actually comes at the end of the writing process. Which means that you can't really write your paper straight through, without going back and rewriting it to match what you've figured out!
I hope this all helps. I really can't overemphasize the need for a good, strong, interesting thesis in your papers. At very least, any paper that I would give an "A" or "A-" to would need to demonstrate a good thesis.
Any more questions? Feel free to ask in class or on the blog!
1 comment:
Great - excellent question. Well, if I remember those office hours correctly enough, I said something to the effect that a thesis states your argument. It doesn't merely tell the reader what you're going to do in the paper (e.g. "In this paper I will compare Nietzsche and Stevens"), it tells the reader what you're going to say in the paper (i.e. "While Stevens' poems seem to endorse Nietzsche's idea that language is always only metaphoric, in fact Stevens' choice of punctuation shows that he does believe in a fundamental, knowable reality").
Another way to say this is that the thesis tells the reader where he or she will be at the end of paper. I sometimes like to think of a thesis as pointing out a flag you've planted far in the distance, at the paper's end. The thesis says something like "You see that flag way at the end? I know it's not too clear from here, but that's where this path leads, and by the end of the paper you'll be able to see it clearly." It's a way of letting the reader know where you'll be going, what your paper will have proved by its end.
This should also mean that not only should your thesis be an argument, it should be interesting. After all, the thesis tips your cards a bit, giving the reader a sense of what he or she will be learning by the end of the paper. A good thesis lures the reader in, encouraging her or him to keep reading, since he or she wants to see how the story turns out, or how you'll be making that argument, or what that argument will finally mean.
Which, if you think about it, also means that your final thesis (the one that is in the paper you actually turn in to us) is something you'll probably write after you've written most of your paper. When you first start writing, you can't know exactly what you'll be arguing. This is because you likely haven't looked at your evidence enough! A great strategy (it's the one that I use), is to start with a working thesis, that perhaps tells you as you write where you think you'll be going. But after you've written a draft or two, you'll probably see that where you actually ended up isn't quite where you thought you would. So you then go back and modify your working thesis to reflect what your paper is actually arguing.
So, as you can see, though the thesis comes at the beginning of the paper, it actually comes at the end of the writing process. Which means that you can't really write your paper straight through, without going back and rewriting it to match what you've figured out!
I hope this all helps. I really can't overemphasize the need for a good, strong, interesting thesis in your papers. At very least, any paper that I would give an "A" or "A-" to would need to demonstrate a good thesis.
Any more questions? Feel free to ask in class or on the blog!
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