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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

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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 writer’s potential thesis statements in a way that better accounts for the evidence. Be sure that the thesis has tension—that it generates forward momentum by casting its primary claim against another possibility. Try starting the thesis with the word “although” or use the formulation, “Seems to be about X, but is also (or really) about Y.”

Mall Cuisine

[1] At the outer reaches of an enclosed shopping mall near downtown Boston’s Copley Square there is an interesting restaurant named Bon Marche. The mall is huge, connecting several high-rise hotels, and it offers dozens of upscale shops.

[2] My friend and I entered Bon Marche just to look around; we were hungry for some breakfast, and it looked promising. Almost immediately a Latino guy about twenty wearing a green beret stopped us to give us a check. He told us that there was one for take-out and one for eating there, and then he explained how the restaurant worked. There were a number of different stations serving food, and you were supposed to give them your ticket to be stamped when you got food there. The ticket, by the way, which was designed to look like a passport, included a comical warning that if you lost it, you would be required to wash dishes there for two days.

[3] The stations were scattered all over this enormous room, and each one offered a different kind of food. (We later learned that they had a market downstairs too, where they sold the food uncooked.) A lot of the foods were international in flavor. There was lots of seafood, especially shellfish of