Thesis Statements

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Thesis Statements

Based on “The Thesis Statement” in “Conventions of College Writing.”

Key Ideas

Some criteria for good theses:

• Keep your thesis focused enough that you can make a convincing argument for it in the space available.
• Keep your thesis objective, i.e., you and your readers need to be able to reach a definite conclusion about whether your claim holds or not. In particular, the claim can’t be so vague that different people understand it to mean diametrically opposite things, or so subjective that evidence and logic don’t play a role in deciding whether it holds.

Write about what you know, for instance if choosing between theses, one that draws on your existing knowledge is better than one that doesn’t. Even if you will need to do more research to really decide what you believe, prior knowledge can guide you in what to research and where, etc.

The thesis can and should be a guide to your whole paper, i.e., to what you need to say about what, not just a sentence that introduces the paper.

Examples

Discuss/workshop possible thesis statements from the current essay (or elsewhere).

For example, my thesis behind a lot of recent classes could be written as something like “racial caricatures are still a feature of American entertainment, where they reinforce racist stereotypes by tapping into what everybody (allegedly) knows about other races or countries.” What do you like or dislike about this as a thesis? What improvements would you suggest?

This thesis is way too broad — it could probably be argued for each type of entertainment (literature, music, etc.), and maybe each race or country, in a book. So we narrowed it to music, and to make that less than book length, a particular band. I picked the band based on my knowledge of American music, which doesn’t extend much past the 1970s.

In thinking about how the band I chose uses racial caricatures, I realized that the ones I most remember are actually caricatures of certain Whites, and we wanted to make “racial caricatures” a little more focused anyhow, so we revised the thesis statement to “caricatures of the ’White hillbilly’ are still a feature of the music of the Grateful Dead, where they reinforce racist stereotypes by tapping into what everybody (allegedly) knows about other races or countries.”

We talked about whether the “everybody” is too broad, maybe it should be Americans or something, but the stereotype I have in mind as I think about this thesis probably is one that is known outside the US as well as inside, so we left “everyone” alone. The body of my paper would have to detail how it is that I believe “everybody” knows the stereotype I end up talking about though.

One lesson from this discussion of my thesis is that theses evolve as you reflect on them and get feedback from others. In this case, the thesis I ended up with is much narrower and somewhat different from (but overall more manageable than) what I started with. On balance, this is a good result, but it leaves me feeling that there are things I’d like to say that won’t be front and center any more. But this is the kind of problem that conclusions can help with. Use the conclusion to a paper to point out connections to other areas that you couldn’t explore but maybe others could, or anything else that you ended up thinking would be a way for readers to continue the conversation beyond what you were able to say.

Examples of theses any of you are considering, considered but rejected, want feedback on, etc? (If you want to contribute anonymously, email examples to baldwin@geneseo.edu and I’ll paste them into these notes without names attached.)

“In popular American rapper Jay Z’s ’the story of OJ’ music video, the idea of Black racial stereotypes is effectively used to portray common Black caricatures and emphasize their persistence over time.”

We generally thought this was a good thesis, although maybe it should be a little more specific about which stereotypes and caricatures the video deals with, and the word “effectively” may be vague (effective at what, what’s the criterion for whether a video is or isn’t “effective”).

We also talked briefly about theses related to a rapper exposing and criticizing caricatures, e.g., of women, but showing that they aren’t necessary. There are probably several theses that could come out of this idea; be careful in finalizing a thesis that you only have one (I see a fair number of papers where the thesis statement feels like the author had 2 or 3 things they wanted to talk about, and listed them all).

Next

Peer editing essay 2 drafts.

We’ll do this via Zoom

Have drafts ready to share electronically with a partner by class time Monday.

Please also share them with me by then, and schedule a time early next week to meet with me about them.

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