Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [162]
Step 1: Formulate an idea about your subject, a working thesis.
Working thesis: Educating Rita celebrates the liberating potential of education. The film’s relatively happy ending and the presence of the word educating in the film’s title make this thesis a reasonable opening claim.
Step 2: See how far you can make this thesis go in accounting for evidence.
The working thesis seems compatible, for example, with Rita’s achievement of greater self-awareness and independence. She becomes more articulate, which allows her to free herself from otherwise disabling situations. She starts to think about other kinds of work she might do, rather than assuming that she must continue in the one job she has always done. She travels, first elsewhere in England and then to the Continent. So, the thesis checks out as viable: there is enough of a match with evidence to stick with and evolve it.
Steps 3 & 4: Locate evidence that is not adequately accounted for by the thesis, and ask So what? about the apparent mismatch between the thesis and selected evidence.
Some evidence reveals that the thesis as stated is not the whole picture. Rita’s education causes her to become alienated from her husband, her parents, and her social class; at the end of the film, she is alone and unsure about her direction in life. In Frank’s case, the thesis runs into even more problems. His boredom, drinking, and alienation seem to have been caused, at least in part, by his education rather than by his lack of it. He sees his book-lined study as a prison, not a site of liberation. Moreover, his profound knowledge of literature has not helped him control his life: he comes to class drunk, fails to notice or care that his girlfriend is having an affair with one of his colleagues, and asks his classes whether it is worth gaining all of literature if it means losing one’s soul.
Step 5: Reshape your claim to accommodate the evidence that hasn’t fit.
The idea that the film celebrates the liberating potential of education still fits a lot of significant evidence. Rita is arguably better off at the end of the film than at the beginning: we are not left to believe that she should have remained resistant to education, like her husband, Denny, whose world doesn’t extend much beyond the corner pub. But the thesis also leaves some significant evidence unaccounted for, so the writer would need to bring out the complicating evidence—the film’s seemingly contradictory attitudes about education—and then modify the wording of the thesis in a way that might resolve or explain these contradictions.
Education as represented by the film seems to be of two kinds: enabling and stultifying. The next step in the development of the thesis would be to elaborate on how the film seeks to distinguish enabling forms of education from debilitating ones (as represented by the self-satisfied and status-conscious behavior of the supposedly educated people at Frank’s university). Perhaps this difference is what the film is primarily interested in—not just education’s potential to liberate.
Revised thesis: Educating Rita celebrates the liberating potential of enabling—in contrast to stultifying—education.
Step 6: Repeat steps 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Having refined the thesis in this way, the writer would then repeat the step of seeing what the new wording allows him or her to account for in the evidence. The revised thesis would foreground a contest in the film between two different kinds of and attitudes toward education. This thesis as lens would cause us to see Frank’s problems as being less a product of his education than of the cynical and pretentious versions of education that surround him in his university life. It would also explain the film’s emphasis on Frank’s recovery of at least some of his idealism about education, for which Rita has provided the inspiration.
What else does