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Original Thesis:

“Superman is an unchanging icon because he stands for Truth, Justice, and the American way.”

Complicating Evidence:

Superman has made dramatic body-image changes in his “career.”

Revised Thesis: “Though Superman’s body-image has changed, his status as an icon and his message have remained steady.”

Complicating Evidence:

Older body-images are met with boredom and distaste by the new generation of viewers. He has become younger and more sexual.

Revised Thesis:

“The new young, sexy Superman liberates him from past images, and caters his message to a new, more sexually sophisticated generation of viewers.”

Complicating Evidence:

If Superman’s body-image changes so much, doesn’t this change his message automatically? What does his body-image say? Does his body speak loader than his message?

Revised Thesis:

“A young, sexy Superman liberates his image from a wholesome, community-oriented image and celebrates more explicitly a message of individuality and sexual power.”

Complicating Evidence:

It is the viewers who place these demands on Superman’s image. He is the “offspring” of consumers.

Revised Thesis:

“A younger and more sexualized generation of consumers has liberated Superman’s image from a wholesome, community-oriented image to reflect more readily its own values of individuality and sexual power.”

LOCATING THE EVOLVING THESIS IN THE FINAL DRAFT

Having achieved a final version of a thesis, what next? Why wouldn’t a writer just relocate the last and fullest statement of the thesis to his or her first paragraph and then prove it?

Usually it’s neither possible nor desirable to encapsulate in the opening sentences what it will take the whole paper to explain. The position articulated in the fully evolved thesis is typically too complex to be stated intelligibly and concisely in the introduction. If you approach an essay as an act of thinking, then the evolutions of the thesis record the history of your various changes in thinking as you encounter evidence. If your readers get to see these, they are far more likely to go along with you, literally to follow your trains of thought. Rather than imposing your conclusions, you will be sharing your thought process with the reader, which is what good writing does.

Normally, you lead (usually at the end of the first paragraph or at the beginning of the second) with the best version of your thesis you can come up with that will be understandable to your readers without a lengthy preamble. If you find yourself writing a page-long introductory paragraph to get to your initial statement of thesis, try settling for a simpler articulation of your central idea in its first appearance.

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