Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [164]
The first paragraph does not need to—and usually can’t—offer your conclusion; it will take the body of your paper to accomplish that. It should, however, provide a quick look at particular details that set up the issue. Use these details to generate a theory, a working hypothesis, about whatever it is you think is at stake in the material. The rest of the paper will test and develop this theory.
The Educating Rita paper might open, for example, by using a version of the Seems-to-Be-About-X gambit (see Chapter 4), claiming that at first glance the film seems to celebrate the liberating potential of education. You could then lay out the evidence for this view and proceed to complicate it in the ways we’ve discussed.
Your concluding paragraph should offer the more carefully qualified and evolved version of your thesis that the body of your paper has allowed you to arrive at. Rather than just summarize and restate what you said in your introduction, the concluding paragraph leaves readers with what you take to be your single best insight. It should put what you have had to say into some kind of perspective.
Recognizing and Relocating Your Thesis: A History Professor Speaks
In the following Voice from Across the Curriculum, history professor Ellen Poteet offers suggestions on how writers might best prompt themselves to arrive at and recognize a thesis in their writing.
Voices from Across the Curriculum
For an analytical or interpretive historical essay, thesis is a conventional term and one of much value. The thesis usually is that point of departure from the surfaces of evidence to the underlying significance, or problems, a given set of sources reveal to the reader and writer. In most cases, the thesis is best positioned up front, so that the writer’s audience has a sense of what lies ahead and why it is worth reading on. I say usually and in most cases because the hard and fast rule should not take precedence over the inspirational manner in which a thesis comes to be formulated and recognized by the writer. It is my experience, in fact, that if inspiration strikes, one realizes it only aft er the fact.
Recognizing a thesis can be extremely difficult. It can oft en be a lot easier to talk “about” what one is writing than to say succinctly what the thrust of one’s discussion is. I sometimes ask students to draw a line at the end of a paper aft er they have finished it, and then write one, at most two sentences, saying what they most want to tell their readers. My comment on that postscript frequently is “Great statement of your thesis. Just move it up to your first paragraph where it could begin to develop.”
—Ellen Poteet, Professor of History
* * *
Try This 11.4: Moving from Observations to a Thesis
The following piece of writing is a student’s exploratory draft analyzing a place—a chain restaurant located in a Boston shopping mall. It is an early draft; the writer has not yet been expected to attend to organization, style, and so on. One purpose of such idea-gathering drafts is to survey the data in order to discover one or more possible working theses.
For our purposes, the draft offers an opportunity to identify claims and assess how they connect to the evidence presented. It can also give you practice in reformulating claims on the basis of careful examination of evidence. The steps listed below are a version of the Six Steps for Making a Thesis Evolve. These steps also work well for pairs or small groups of writers working on each others’ drafts.
Underline all of the paper’s claims about the meaning of the details the writer has noticed. Star the claims that seem to be potential thesis formulations.
Examine the match between evidence and claims, focusing on the claims. Where do you find mismatches? Try in a sentence or two to explain the mismatch.
Reformulate one of the