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Assignment: Recognizing and Fixing Weak Thesis Statements

Analyzing Cliches: “Love Is the Answer”

Clichés are not necessarily untrue; they just are not worth saying (even if you’re John Lennon, who offered this sodden truism in one of his more forgettable tunes).

One of the best ways to inoculate yourself against habitually resorting to clichés to provide easy and safe answers to all the problems of the planet— easy because they fit so many situations generically, and safe because, being so common, they must be true—is to go out and collect them, and then use this data-gathering to generate a thesis. Spend a day doing this, actively listening and looking for clichés—from overheard conversations (or your own), from reading matter, from anywhere (talk radio and TV are exceptionally rich resources) that is part of your daily round.

Compile a list, making sure to write down not only each cliché but the context in which it is used. From this data, and applying what you have learned from the chapters in this unit, formulate a thesis and write a paper about one or more of the clichés that infect some aspect of your daily life. You might find it useful to use The Method to identify key shared traits among the clichés and/ or among the contexts in which you have discovered them. And you might apply the advice provided under Weak Thesis Type 3 to work out alternative formulations to certain clichés to discover what that might teach us about the ways clichés function in given situations—how, for example, they do and don’t fit the facts of the situation. If you can find a copy of Paul Muldoon’s short poem, “Symposium,” which is composed entirely of clichéd expressions, it might anchor an analysis or provide a lens for uncovering aspects of your data.

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Chapter 13

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Using Sources Analytically: The Conversation Model

THIS CHAPTER SHOWS you how to integrate secondary sources into your writing. That is often a daunting task because it requires you to negotiate with authorities who generally know more than you do about the subject at hand. Simply ignoring sources is a head-in-the-sand attitude and, besides, you miss out on learning what people interested in your subject are talking about. But what role can you invent for yourself when the experts are talking? Just agreeing with a source is an abdication of your responsibility to present your thinking on the subject. But taking the opposite tack by disagreeing with an expert who has studied your subject and written books about it would also appear to be a fool’s game. So what are you to do?

This chapter attempts to answer that question. It lays out the primary trouble spots that arise when writers use secondary materials, and it suggests remedies— ways of using sources as points of departure for your own thinking rather than using them as either “The Answer” or a straw man. We call this approach conversing with sources.

Six Strategies for Analyzing Sources

Strategy 1: Make Your Sources Speak

Strategy 2: Attend Carefully to the Language of Your Sources by Quoting or Paraphrasing

Strategy 3: Supply Ongoing Analysis of Sources (Don’t Wait until the End)

Strategy 4: Use Your Sources to Ask Questions, Not Just to Provide Answers

Strategy 5: Put Your Sources into Conversation with One Another

Strategy 6: Find Your Own Role in the Conversation

The kind of writing you are doing will affect the way you use sources. Analytical writing uses sources to expand understanding—often to allow readers to view a subject from a range of plausible points of view. This approach differs from the kind of research based writing wherein the goal is to locate a single position that beats out the others in a combative mode. One way sources are often used in an academic setting is as lenses for examining other sources and primary materials. (For using a source as a lens, see Chapter 5, Writing About Reading: More Moves to Make with Written Texts.)

We use the terms source and secondary source interchangeably to designate ideas and information about your subject