Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [152]
5) The derogation of middlebrow, in short, has gone much too far. It’s time to bring middlebrow out of its cultural closet, to hail its emollient properties, to trumpet its mending virtues. For middlebrow not only entertains, it educates—pleasurably training us to appreciate high art.
6) There is a connection between the idea of place and the reality of cellular telephones. It is not encouraging. Places are unique—or at least we like to believe they are—and we strive to experience them as a kind of engagement with particulars. Cell phones are precisely the opposite.
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If you have been taught to write in 5-paragraph form in school, you will initially have some difficulty writing thesis statements of the sort you have just seen. This is because the “thesis statement plus three supporting paragraphs” format of 5-paragraph form invites listing rather than the articulation of ideas. The typical three-part thesis of 5-paragraph form offers a short list of broadly stated topics (rather than well-defined claims about the topics) and then offers examples of each of these in the body paragraphs.
There is nothing wrong with partitioning the development of a subject into manageable parts, but there is a lot wrong with a thesis that makes no claim or an overly general and obvious claim such as “Television causes adolescents to become violent, lazy, and illread.” All three parts of this general claim may be true, but nothing much of substance can be said about them in a short paper that is trying to cover all three. And notice the lack of tension in this sample thesis statement. Try writing a better thesis statement— one that has tension—about the impact of some aspect of television on teenagers.
A Note on the Syntax of Good Thesis Statements
Before we move on to concentrated applications of the procedure for making a thesis evolve, take a look at the shape of imprecise thesis statements:
Environmentalism prevents economic growth.
Tax laws benefit the wealthy.
The economic situation today is bad.
Women in contemporary films are more sensitive than men.
All four are simple, declarative sentences that offer very broad assertions. They are both grammatically and conceptually simple. More than that, they’re slack—especially the first three, in which the primary claim stands alone, not in relation to anything else.
The very shape of these weak thesis statements is a warning sign. Most effective working theses, though they may begin more simply, achieve both grammatical and conceptual complexity as they evolve. Such theses contain tension in their syntax, the balance of this against that. Thus, they begin with “although” or incorporate “however” or use an “appears to be about x but is actually about y” kind of formulation. (See “Appears to be about X…” in Chapter 4.)
Here, by contrast, are three possible versions of the fourth weak thesis above:
Although women more readily cry in contemporary films, the men, by not crying, seem to win the audience’s favor.
The complications that fuel the plots in today’s romantic comedies arise because women and men express their sensitivity so differently; the resolutions, however, rarely require the men to capitulate.
A spate of recent films has witnessed the emergence of the new “womanly” man as hero, and not surprisingly, his tender qualities seem to be the reason he attracts the female love interest.
THE RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THESIS AND EVIDENCE: THE THESIS AS LENS
What we have said so far about the thesis does not mean that all repetition of ideas in an essay is bad or that a writer’s concluding paragraph should have no reference to the way the paper began. One function of the thesis is to provide the connective tissue, so to speak, that holds together a paper’s three main parts—beginning,