Welcome to another Tutor Short provided by the Educational Support Services
Department of Lehigh Carbon Community College in Shcnecksville, PA, just
outside Allentown.
These videos provide key learnings for English and other writing based courses
provided here at LCCC.
Please remember that the Educational Support Services Department does provide walk-in
tutoring 5 days a week. Online writing tutoring is also available through the
college website.
Today we're going to talk about the dreaded thesis statement.
A lot of students find the prospect of writing a thesis statement to be very
daunting,
because it's sometimes hard for students to understand just what a thesis
statement is.
But once you do understand the very simple definition of a thesis
it's actually not that hard to come up with one.
It comes down to a question of what you're trying to argue.
When you have a paper
and you're trying to come up with a thesis statement,
ask yourself : What am I trying to prove here?
What do all I want my audience, what do I want my reader,
to believe when they are finished
reading this paper?
Your thesis statement
is simply
a statement
of what you're trying to prove.
When you answer that question of what am I trying to show,
you also have your answer
of what should my thesis statement be.
If you want a more precise definition,
a thesis statement is a concise arguable summary of what your paper's about;
it's going to be supported by the evidence in your paper,
and usually it's located at the very end of the introduction.
Let's break that down a little bit.
A thesis statement, first of all, is concise. That means that typically it's
only one sentence long.
It's a compression of your whole argument
into one simple statement.
Which means that you're not using all of your support,
you're just saying what you're setting out to prove.
It's also arguable;
that means that it is
not just a statement of
what's going to be in your paper, but it's a statement of what you're going to
prove in your paper.
This means that the state is going to be somewhat contentious; you can debate back
and forth whether or not
you believe that this is true.
For example,
you could have a thesis that is
just, I love
puppies.
I just really love puppies!
That wouldn't be a particularly good thesis because
it's hard to really make that into a contentious argument.
You love puppies; there's no way that i'm going to be able to disprove that
no matter how much I love kittens.
A more contentious and more interesting thesis statement would be,
I love puppies so much, that everyone should be given a puppy on taxpayer
dollar.
That's a little bit more contentious;
there's more debate they can take place there about whether or not
the cost of
giving everyone a puppy is really worth
the potential benefits of that.
It's not a particularly good argument,
but it is a good thesis.
Second of all, it's going to be supported by the evidence in your paper.
That means that
a thesis is more than just a tool for your reader. Normally thesis for the
reader
can be used as a way of understanding what you're going to be arguing.
For you,it can be used as a way of making sure that you are on target with
your argument;
that you are
sticking to the correct path
that youaren't, that you don't have whole paragraphs
that are
extraneous, or arguing something different, or introducing facts that
don't really matter
for your broader argument.
And of course three and it's usually located at the end of the
introduction.
This can be either an introductory paragraph, in most cases the you'll run
into
as a starting student here at LCCC,
or it can be a whole introductory section in a longer paper.
You might end up
writing some more advanced papers that have an introductory section that's
more than one paragraph,
but the thesis still
typically comes at the end of that introduction, and is, as I said, an
indicator for the reader of where you're going to be going with your argument.
This might all still seem a little abstract, so let's look at a specific example.
Playing a musical instrument is good for children countless ways.
This is
often the kind of statement that I'll see English 105 students
presenting to me when they're working on the research papers. The
research paper is
an eight to ten page
paper that you'll be required as an English 105 student to write.
On the surface, this looks like a fairly strong thesis.
You do have a topic,
playing a musical instrument,
and you are making a statement about that, it's good for children.
But it's actually not a strongly contentious statement. It's the
kind a statement that
there's enough scientific that playing a musical instrument is
beneficial; that it's
not the kind of thing that we can
strongly contend or that someone can really
effectively argue against.
This makes it
kind of a weak thesis.
What we have here
is a
broad sort of statement of generally accepted fact.
There's not a lot of argumentation that can take place here.
So let's add something a bit more contentious in.
Playing a musical instrument is good for children in countless ways,
therefore we should increase funding for music programs in schools.
Now we have
the statement of facts
that you're going to research.
So that's part of the research paper
or, part of the point of the research paper,
and then that is followed by
a contentious argument:
therefore we should
increase funding for music programs in schools.
This can be much more easley debated because
now you're taking the scientific evidence is saying this alone is strong
enough to support
this kind of raising of funding.
Whereas someone else might say, well
maybe the scientific evidence points this way,
but that still doesn't justify
the use of taxpayer money for this kind of program;
They can be argued back and forth.
And remember,
this will come at the very end
of your introduction.
So this
will
all be part of your introduction,
with your thesis statement at the end,
and then everything that follows
after that.
From the first
body paragraph on
will be part of your argument to support
this idea.
Remember,
a thesis is more than just a useful indicator for your reader
or something that
is helpful for your professor to understand your argument; it's good for you
to understand your argument as well and make sure that you're always on the right
track.
You might notice that this is, if you've been through the public education system
in Pennsylvania,
a little bit different than the thesis statements that you'll see on the
PSSA.
A thesis statement for the PSSA
typically follows the format:
We should increase funding for music programs in schools because playing a musical
instrument
helps children in math,
helps them understand
complex concepts,
and helps them be a better person.
Those would be maybe some of our
countless ways in which playing a musical instrument
helps a student.
This is
a
good way of sometimes constructing a thesis,
but is not the only way
of constructing a thesis.
And what's more important
is the fact that you have an argument there
and
a general indicator of your topic,
which is the same as what we have in this example.
Those parts, having those component parts, of
topic, an argument,
are much more important than following that kind of rigid, regimented
format.
So that's the research paper thesis.
But some students
go on beyond their 105 course to the 106 course which is our
first literature course.
And they say to me,
Well, I have
a good understanding of how to write a research paper thesis but
I just don't know what to do now that I have to
come up with all this weird, literary analysis stuff.
What should I say about a
book, or a novel, or a poem
that actually counts as
an argument?
The good news is that a thesis for
a
literary paper is very similar to a thesis for a research paper. You're just
drawing upon different sources.
Rather than drawing upon research evidence,
you're drawing upon the stories, or poems, or plays
themselves
and saying,
what is present in this text suggests
this reading or understanding
of this
novel, or play, or story.
This is a common early example
of the kind of theses
that people write
when they're first starting out their English 106 course.
Emily Dickinson's poetry uses symbolism.
Emily Dickinson was an early nineteenth century author
whose poems did use a whole lot of symbolism
to explore
concepts such as death
and lonliness
and uh...
passion; all sorts of interesting things like that. She used a whole lot of
symbolism in her poetry,
which
should give you a hint as to why,
even though this sounds like a good literary thesis,
it's actually not as strong of a thesis as we would like.
See, we've got
our poet here,
Emily Dickinson,
her poetry; so that's our topic.
And we've got our literary term, which a lot of
English professors like you to be using in literary papers. They like you to show
that you understand the terminology.
But, what we don't have a
is an argument.
As I just said, Emily Dickinson used a lot of symbolism;
there's really no contention there.
No
literary scholar is going to be looking at your paper and say,
You know, I disagree...I don't think that Emily Dickinson ever used
symbolism
at all.
That would be absolutely absurd.
There's
no way that would ever happen in real life.
So, unfortunately that means that we don't have a strong argument yet. We need to
come up with some reason why the symbolism is important. So let's say
Emily Dickinson's poetry uses symbolism to disrupt her audience's
expectations and perceptions.
So now it's not just that she's using symbolism;
Now we've got our topic:
Emily Dickinson's poetry.
We've got
our literary term,
but now
we have this whole explanation of why she's using that.
And this is something that we can
argue back and forth
So I might say, well Emily Dickinson's poetry is really bizarre.
There's symbols in there that you just would not expect to see;
she uses words in surprising and shocking ways.
So I think her symbolism is used to disrupt the reader, to confuse the reader,
to make the reader
rethink
their position or understanding of certain things.
And another literary scholar could look at this and say,
that's absurd; that's ridiculous.
Her symbolism is totally understandable
if you
have read enough of her poetry,
understand enough about her life;
if you
have studied her for many years you can understand each one of her symbols and
they're not meant to disrupt;
they are meant to evoke,
an admittedly very unique worldview,
but one that is certainly consistent and
comprehensible.
And we can argue this back and forth and debate,
often
through papers because
English
scholars
will find any reason to write a new paper. But
we can debate this back and forth which makes it a strong thesis. And just as
before
we have now our introduction
with our thesis of the at the end,
and then everything in the paper.
Even though it's drawing from
poems rather than scholarly articles,
it's still ultimately going to be used to support
that thesis,
which means not just summarizing what's in the poem,
but explaining why what's in the poem reinforces your argument.
To summarize
a thesis statement
is a concise summary of what your argument is.
It is
an argument; it's an arguable statement that can be contended by another reader.
It comes at the end of your introduction, and introduces both for yourself
and for your reader
what you are trying to prove in the paper.
Everything that falls in the paper
should, in one way or another, refer back to and support
that thesis statement.