Keep going until you have learned something
The reason that most instructors give writing assignments is that they believe, with good reason, that the act of writing can teach you something. If you take an assignment seriously, the experience of creating, developing, and structuring a set of ideas can teach you things that just going to class and reading a textbook cannot.
One way to judge whether you have generated a good idea is to consider seriously whether the idea has changed your outlook. Have you learned something that you did not know, considered something that you never have considered before, changed your opinion about a controversial issue, or learned to look at something in a different way? If you have accomplished any of these things, you most likely have produced a solid, fruitful writing topic.
STRUCTURING IDEAS
Good ideas, even well stated, do not guarantee a good essay. Ideas, no matter how brilliant, must be organized effectively and presented intelligently so they can be understood by a reader. The previous two chapters focused on ways that you interact with both the ideas that you read and the ideas that you generate in response to your reading; both chapters dealt only with you and a text. This chapter will show you how to structure your ideas so that they can be read and appreciated by someone else.
Important structural elements of academic essays include thesis statements, introductions, transitions, and conclusions. This chapter will define these elements and offer techniques to help you use them effectively. Understanding these structural conventions will not only help you produce the kinds of essays that many of your instructors want to receive, it will also help you improve both your thinking and your writing.
In many ways, academic essays that adhere strictly to these guidelines are artificial creations rarely found outside the college classroom—and even in college classes, many teachers will expect you to move beyond these traditional academic writing techniques. But much can be said for the traditional thesis statement and the structural apparatus that supports it. Learning to use them properly can help you stay focused on a single idea and marshal evidence to support a claim, which are essential abilities for every kind of writing: academic, creative, or professional.
However, important as they are, mastering these techniques should not be your goal. They are designed simply to help you reach the ultimate goal of communicating your ideas to someone else. As the ancient Zen masters understood, the methods designed to lead people to enlightenment are not the same thing as enlightenment itself. As you progress as a student and a writer, keep your goal of communication separate from the techniques that you use to achieve it. Intelligent, thoughtful communication is more important than slavish devotion to technique, and these guidelines should be followed only to the extent that they help you reach that goal.
THESIS STATEMENTS What Is a Thesis?
People can mean two different things when they talk about a "thesis." On the one hand, a thesis is the basic argument that a particular piece of writing makes—the point that an author wants to get across. Most writers, in most circumstances, want to communicate something to an audience; therefore, most writing has a thesis. On the other hand, when writing instructors use the word "thesis," they are usually referring to a thesis statement, a single sentence that summarizes or encapsulates an essay's main argument. Thesis statements of this sort are not required of every kind of writing, nor are they always found in the works of the best professional writers. These writers have learned how to advance a thesis (in the first sense of the word) without creating a single sentence to sum up the argument.
However, composing a thesis statement can be a very useful exercise for developing an argument. It accomplishes several important tasks: (1) it helps you clarify exactly what you are trying to say, which makes the writing process smoother and easier; (2) it serves as a reference point that you can use to eliminate ideas that do not support the main point of the essay; and (3) it tells the reader what kinds of arguments to expect and forecasts what follows.
One common misconception is that a thesis statement should summarize an essay rather than an argument. The difference is crucial. A thesis statement designed to summarize an essay will usually try to provide a miniature outline and can very quickly become unwieldy. Consider the following example:
There are many differences between Seneca and John Henry Newman: Newman was religious and Seneca was not; Seneca lived in the ancient Roman Empire while Newman lived in Victorian England at a time when it was becoming a modern democracy; and Seneca believed that liberal education was the only good kind of education while Newman believed that both liberal and useful education had their place.
While this sentence may be a good one-sentence summary of a three-to-five- page essay, it does not make a good thesis statement because it does not make an argument. In attempting to summarize everything that the essay says, this sentence does not actually have a point. A better thesis statement would try to summarize less about the essay and more clearly state a major claim:
Newman's view of liberal education is much less restrictive than Seneca's because the society in which Newman lived required most people to acquire enough useful knowledge to earn a living.
This sentence boils down all of the various ideas in the first example into a single, coherent, focused argument that can serve as the main point that the essay will make.
The Thesis Statement as an Argument
Any argument must have two elements: a claim and support for that claim. Because a thesis statement is always, at some level, an argument, it should also include these two elements. The following sentences would not make good thesis statements because they contain only a claim and do not support that claim:
Gandhi had a better understanding of poverty than Malthus. True objectivity in science can never be achieved. Liberal general education is a good idea.
To turn these claims into arguments, and therefore thesis statements, you would have to add a "because clause" (which may or may not contain the word "because"), or a brief statement of support that gives the rationale for the claim:
Gandhi's understanding of poverty, which takes into account the spiritual side of human nature, is better than that of Malthus, whose analysis is solely economic.
True objectivity in science requires something that never can be achieved: the presence of a purely unbiased observer.
Liberal general education is a good idea because it prepares people for a variety of different careers rather than for a single job.
Refining Your Thesis Statement
When you view the thesis statement as an argument, with both a claim and support for that claim, you can use it to test whether your essay's argument works. If the thesis statement is a weak argument, then the chances are very good that the essay is also weak. Keep refining your thesis statement until you are reasonably sure that it is a good argument, and then make sure your essay properly addresses the point of your thesis statement.
Revising a thesis statement is really the same thing as revising the ideas in your essay. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you revise a thesis statement:
Present an arguable claim
While this requirement is covered at greater length in the previous chapter (see "Construct a debatable position," p. 630), it is worth repeating that an essay topic—and therefore a thesis statement, which presents the essay topic—needs to be debatable. A thesis statement should present a claim that a reasonable person could disagree with.