A weak thesis statement

A weak thesis statement... ...makes no claim
"This paper will examine the similarities and differences
between two articles."
Solution: Raise specific issues for the essay to explore.
...is obviously true or a statement of fact "Tourists are often out of place in other cultures."
Solution: Find an avenue of inquiry-a question about the fact or an
issue raised by them. Make an assertion that the reader
could disagree with.
...restates conventional wisdom or a cliché
"We shouldn't judge others because it's the inside that counts."
Solution: Seek to "complicate" your thesis. See more than one point of
view on your subject. Offer something new to the "cliché." ...offers personal conviction as the basis for the claim
"Clearly, Kincaid is being one-sided."
Solution: Treat your ideas as hypotheses to be tested, rather than
obvious truths. Maintain some distance from your subject.
...makes an overly broad claim
"Limerick shows her knowledge about the West." Solution: Convert broad, generic categories into more specific, complex
assertions. Find ways to bring out the complexity of your argument.
Thesis Exercises Because the process of composing a thesis is complex, thesis creation
exercises can be difficult to execute in class. As a result, most of the
exercises below are thesis revision exercises that challenge students to
add complexity and nuance to theses they have already composed.
Undergraduates typically feel they understand how to create a thesis.
However, the theses they compose are typically vague, overly broad, contain
several unconnected parts, or define a topic rather than a thesis. Many of
the exercises below are designed to aid in the correction of these issues. Thesis Exercise #1 - (Ryan Wepler)
Guide students through the thought process of creating a thesis based on a
selection of evidence. Because thesis creation requires a great deal of
critical thought, this exercise doubles as a thesis exercise and a critical
thinking exercise. In this form, this exercise works best for close
reading essays.
1. Choose a series of short passages from the work your students have
been assigned to close read. These should be inherently interesting
moments, but ones for which you do not have a pre-formed thesis in
mind. Combine these passages into a one page handout and distribute
the handout to your students to begin the exercise.
2. After giving students a few minutes to read the handout, ask them to
write for 4-5 minutes about a common theme they detect in the series
of passages.
3. Divide students into groups of 3-4 and ask the groups to discuss
commonalities in their close readings and to produce a thesis
statement based on their individual readings. Make sure each group
writes its thesis statement down. [You might provide a sample thesis
statement as a model for them to emulate].
4. Ask one member from each group to write his or her group's thesis on
the board.
5. Discuss the theses, assessing them in terms of the criteria set forth
by Gordon Harvey and revising as necessary.
Thesis Exercise #2 - (Kerry Walk)
Compile (or make up) both problematic and excellent theses in response to
your essay assignment. Ask students to assess each one in terms of the
criteria for "thesis" set forth by Gordon Harvey. Follow up by having
students draft or revise their own theses.
Thesis Exercise #3 - (Ryan Wepler)
Ask students to e-mail you theses (one apiece) that they have composed in
response to an essay assignment. Select 6-8 of them for a handout. After
distributing the handout in class, run the discussion as follows.
1. Workshop one or two of them as a group according to Harvey's criteria.
2. Ask students to break into groups an revise the other theses according
to Harvey's criteria.
3. Reconvene, ask groups to share their revised theses, discuss as a
class.
Thesis Exercise #4 - (Kerry Walk)
Once students have a draft in hand, put them in groups of 3 or 4 and have
them workshop their theses. This exercise will work only if you've shown
them how to assess a thesis (see above).
Thesis Exercise #5 - (Kerry Walk)
Choose a text (or issue, event, object, or phenomenon) that students won't
be writing on, then, as a group, go through the stages of developing a
motivated thesis about it. This exercise models the thinking that students
need to do. Follow up by asking them to draft a thesis of their own. Lesson Plan: Testing a Thesis (Judy Swan) Lesson objective: (1) To test an argument before committing to it in a
draft and (2) to explore the relationship between thesis and argument
[again]. Total estimated time: 50-70 minutes Additional outcomes: Students get a chance to keep talking through their
individual topics before the draft is due Assignment sequence that is underway: Develop an argument about a problem
in some current area of gene therapy. Work completed before class: Students have done general research for their
essays and have drafted a preliminary thesis paragraph. Step 1: Have students read a group of potential theses (drawn from the
previous semester's work on the same unit) and rank them by their
potential. This involved discussion of the theses themselves and of ideas
about thesis in general. (10 min) Step 2: Group examination of 3 specific theses. The theses varied in the
ways you'd expect; most promised too much, and several implied interesting
sounding problems for which they offered totally indefensible theses. I
asked them to take the statement and work backwards into the introduction
and forward into the argument. If this is to be the thesis, what does the
introduction need to accomplish? What must be set up to get us to the
point of suggesting this argument? What kinds of issues does this thesis
raise for development in the essay? Where is this paper going to go? We
then considered recasting the thesis to something more workable, looking
again at the effects of that change on the introduction and the main
arguments. (15 min) Step 3: Group work on 3 more theses, replicating the large-group work.
They were then to rank the theses in terms of 'productivity': Which thesis
seems most likely to produce an interesting and coherent argument? For
those thesis that were "not yet ready for drafting," they were asked to
recast the thesis and problem to find something more successful. (20 min) Step 4: Check in again to see how each group has ranked the theses. (5
min) Step 5: Work on your own preliminary thesis. (5-10 min) Step 6: (If there's time) Share this reworked thesis with one other
person and discuss. (5-10 min) I followed this class with a workshop session of point outlines: Students
arrived with 4 copies of the points they planned to make in their essays,
and they workshopped them for the session. Several students felt these two
assignments essentially gave them ways of testing their arguments out in
detail before they went to draft; they felt the resulting working drafts
were more like later drafts, and they could concentrate in revision less on
figuring out what they wanted to say and more on figuring out how they
could best say it.
Lesson Plan: Thesis in a Lens Essay (Steven Lestition) The context of the course in which this fits (what assignments are underway
at this time): Students will be beginning their Unit 2 paper, which will
ask them to use a "theoretical lens" to interpret some original source text
(i.e. a poem), as it relates to the theme of the course (the structure of
imagination in ... poetry, in this case).
Lesson objective: Learning to apply aspects of a "theoretical lens" to a
text. Learning to recognize what is a "common ground" or already "accepted
knowledge" that a reader in the class can be expected to know, versus that
aspect of a text which might require more thought and explanation in order
for the writer and reader to understand it. How to develop an interesting
problem or question, as well as an arguable thesis, about a text, on the
basis of those considerations. Work to be completed before class:
1) Select a poem or two by the author we're reading (Robert Frost) which
you think is particularly "imaginative" and write a short paragraph
explaining why.
2) Students should then read (or re-read) selections from four of the
theorists we read about the structure of the imagination in poetry--
Elaine Scarry, Helen Vendler, Robert Pinsky and Robert Frost-and pick
out a passage or two which they think "applies" to the poem and
confirms their ideas about why it is imaginative. Write a few lines
to explain how & why that is so.
3) Students should also note at least one other passage, in each of the
theorists, which raises questions or issues which they think might
potentially apply to passages of the poems they have selected, but are
not sure how they would explain that application, or the insight that
would emerge from such a view of the poem. Students should also make
an "inventory list" of those components of the theories which they do
not understand, or which they cannot readily apply to the poems. Structure of the class session on this topic: 1) Students share their written statements with members of their 3-person
"Writing/Discussion Groups" and discuss four issues:
a) Do the other two members of the group think that the theoretical
approach the other student uses is a good explanation of the
imaginative component of the poem in question?
b) Might any of the theoretical insights into poetry and poetic