English
150
Holper
The Arguable Thesis
Much of the writing that students do in college (and some
business writing as well) is thesis-driven: that is, papers which focus on
clarifying and supporting a main point.
In this English 150 class, the last two essay we'll do are
thesis-support papers, as is the in-class competency essay exam (and all of the
practice in-class essays we will write to prepare for this exam). If you go on to take English 1A, you will
find that this course also concentrates primarily on thesis-driven essays.
In English 150 and English 1A, you will hear a lot about the
“argument” of your essays. By
“argument” we don’t mean a disagreement or a dispute as we use the word in
everyday life. Instead we mean the
logical structure of an essay, the process of reasoning that the writer uses to
present and support the thesis
From other English courses, most of you may already have
some idea–perhaps a very good idea--of a what a thesis is and the role that it
plays in an academic essay. This acquaintance
with the concept of a thesis should provide you with a useful starting point
for understanding how we will define the term in English 150. But you must be willing to expand upon what
you already know, since each level of English course you take will have
increasingly rigorous standards for critical thinking and logic, and therefore what
may have been a perfectly good thesis for a high school essay or an English 350
essay may not fulfill the standards in English 150 nearly as well.
So how do we “define” thesis? The following answers are often the first to pop into the average
person’s head:
The
main topic or subject of an essay
The
main topic plus an opinion about it
The
main point of an essay
The last two answers are closest to how we will use the term
in English 150, but our definition will need to be much more finely tuned,
and our standards for what makes a strong thesis will be more difficult to
achieve.
In English 150, you will hear and read the following
admonition over and over again:
The thesis must clearly assert an arguable
judgment which is relevant to a general audience.
To figure out what this means, let’s break down the characteristics of a strong thesis:
•
A thesis
must clearly identify the main topic of the essay and establish the focus for the rest of
the essay. It is like a contract
you are making with your readers, promising them that the rest of the essay
will concentrate on this primary point.
•
A thesis
must asserts an arguable judgment rather than a self-evident one. Common
knowledge or a statement of fact cannot serve
as an acceptable thesis. In English 150, your thesis statements
should take a definite position on an arguable issue.
Examples of
statements of fact: “Regular exercise is good for most people’s overall
health,” “California’s current budget
crisis is having an impact on many public services,” “Smoking is a terribly destructive habit because it causes lung
cancer, emphysema, and heart disease,” “There has been a lot of controversy
about the presence of big box chain stores and fast food restaurants in some
Humboldt County communities”
Examples of
common knowledge: “Life is full of many changes–some positive and some
negative,” “Working full-time while going to college can be very difficult,”
“Although the responsibility is sometimes hard, parents should set some
sensible limits for their children,” “Earning a college degree is usually a
positive step toward insuring a successful future.”
Note that most of
these theses do have judgment words like “good,” “destructive,” “difficult,”
“should,” “positive,” but the inclusion of these words alone is not enough to
make the assertions arguable since they really do not have any reasonable
opposition.
•
A thesis
must assert a point which is relevant to a general audience.
Avoid judgments that are so personalized that a reader who is outside
your circle of family and friends will be unable to assess the argument and/or
to muster up much interest in the subject.
Examples of
theses which are not relevant to a general audience: “From Little League to
college, team sports have played an important role in making me strong and
confident,” “Although getting clean and sober–and staying that way–has been the
biggest challenge I’ve ever faced, it has also saved my life and made it worth
living,” “Working at the Jitterbean
coffee drive-thru in Eureka is a great job,” “Parenting a child with Attention
Deficit Disorder has been quite a learning process.”
Note that some of
these topics could be converted into theses that would be arguable to a general
audience if they were de-personalized and established as arguable issues. Also keep in mind that personal examples
may play a significant supporting role in your essay–but not in the thesis or
topic sentences.
•
A thesis
should be very clearly written in precise, familiar terms, avoiding language
which is overly vague, broad, specialized, or technical. You
can assume that your general audience consists of well-informed, intelligent
adults with good, general vocabularies, but you cannot assume they are
specialists in a particular subject–at least not in English 150..
•
Example of a
vague and overly broad thesis: “In some cultures, aspects of music may play
a role in life’s spiritual and metaphysical dimension.”
Example of a
thesis that is too specialized for a general reader: “The image of the
child in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific, historical, and
literary narratives is often representing or figuring interiority, growth,
historicity, and development.” (This
thesis may be quite clear to advanced scholars of literature or history, but a
general audience would probably find it too obscure.)
•
A thesis may
reliably forecast the organization of the essay, letting the reader know what
main supporting points will be covered and in what order. This
forecast is sometimes called a plan of development (POD) or a
blueprint. A POD is often a good idea,
but it is not an obligatory part of the thesis in English 150; you may present
it in the sentence following the thesis, or you may skip it altogether
Example of POD in
thesis: Skateboarding should be limited to special parks because it
poses a nuisance to pedestrians, leads to serious injuries, and causes
thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to public and private property.
Example of POD
following thesis: Skateboarding is
not just a harmless recreation and should, in fact, be limited to special
parks. As it now stands, the sport poses
a nuisance to pedestrians, leads to serious injuries, and causes thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to public and
private property.
The following thesis rules also
apply to your essays in English 150, but keep in mind that as your academic
writing become increasingly skilled and sophisticated, you may outgrow these
restrictions. And they may not apply to
the essays you write in other courses (check with your instructors).
•
Limit your
thesis statement to one sentence.
•
Do not frame your thesis as a question–it
should be a declarative statement.
•
Do not rely on an implied thesis. We will encounter some implied theses in our
150 readings, but your essays must have an explicit thesis statement.
•
The thesis must
appear in the essay’s first paragraph (the introduction) at the end of
the paragraph.
•
Underline
your thesis in English 150
to make it easier for me (and for you!) to identify it.