- •What is an academic paper?
- •Writing for College How It Differs From Writing in High School
- •Constructing An Informed Argument What You Know
- •Summarize.
- •Evaluate.
- •Analyze.
- •Synthesize.
- •Choosing An Appropriate Topic
- •Finding a Rhetorical Stance
- •Consider Your Position
- •Consider Your Audience
- •Considering Structure
- •Introductions:
- •Thesis Sentence:
- •The Other Side(s):
- •Supporting Paragraphs:
- •Conclusions:
- •Using Appropriate Tone and Style
- •Tips For Newcomers
- •Coming Up With Your Topic
- •Reading to Write
- •Read Actively
- •Break the Linear Tradition
- •Trust Your Gut
- •Enter the Conversation
- •Use the Margins
- •Moving Outside the Text
- •Reading Differently in the Disciplines
- •Resources for Improving Reading
- •Using Critical Theory
- •Feminist criticism:
- •Marxist criticism:
- •Psycho-analytic criticism:
- •New Historicism:
- •Deconstruction:
- •Reader-Response:
- •Informal Strategies for Invention
- •Brainstorming
- •Freewriting
- •Discovery Draft
- •Formal Strategies for Invention
- •Five w's and an h
- •Tagmemics
- •Aristotle's Topoi
- •1) Use Definition
- •2) Use Comparison
- •3) Explore Relationship
- •4) Examine Circumstance
- •5) Rely on Testimony
- •Focusing Your Ideas
- •Nutshelling
- •Broadening Your Topic
- •First, try to make connections.
- •Second, turn your idea inside out.
- •Third, consider the context.
- •Narrowing Your Topic
- •First, test your claim.
- •Then look for examples.
- •Look for more examples.
- •Finally, consider the context.
- •Researching Your Topic
- •Finding Sources
- •Using Your Sources
- •Summarize Your Sources
- •Categorize Your Sources
- •Interrogate Your Sources
- •Make Your Sources Work For You
- •Keep Track of Your Sources
- •Cite Sources Correctly
- •Developing Your Thesis
- •Writing a Thesis Sentence
- •A good thesis sentence will make a claim.
- •A good thesis sentences will control the entire argument.
- •A good thesis will provide a structure for your argument.
- •Alternatives to the Thesis Sentence
- •The Thesis Question
- •The Implied Thesis
- •Will This Thesis Sentence Make the Grade? (a Check List)
- •What else do you need to know about thesis sentences?
- •A good thesis usually relies on a strong introduction, sharing the work.
- •The structure of your thesis, along with its introduction, should in some way reflect the logic that brought you to your argument.
- •A good working thesis is your best friend.
- •Constructing the Thesis: a Writer's Clinic for Beginners
- •What is a Working Thesis Sentence?
- •Revising the Working Thesis
- •Revising Your Thesis For Eloquence
- •Writing: Considering Structure & Organization
- •Organizing Your Thoughts
- •Let Your Thesis Direct You
- •Sketching Your Argument
- •Outlining Your Argument
- •Modes of Arrangement: Patterns for Structuring Your Paper
- •Constructing Paragraphs
- •What is a paragraph?
- •Writing the Topic Sentence
- •Developing Your Argument: Evidence
- •Developing Your Argument: Arrangement
- •Coherence
- •Introductions and Conclusions
- •Introductions
- •Announce your topic broadly, then declare your particular take.
- •Provide any background material important to your argument.
- •Define key terms, as you intend to make use of them in your argument.
- •Use an anecdote or quotation.
- •Acknowledge your opponents.
- •Conclusions
- •Revision: Cultivating a Critical Eye
- •Why And How To Revise
- •Large-Scale Revision.
- •Small-Scale Revision.
- •Editing.
- •Proofreading.
- •Developing Objectivity
- •Did I fulfill the assignment?
- •Did I say what I intended to say?
- •What are the strengths of my paper?
- •What are the weaknesses of my paper?
- •Analyzing Your Work
- •Consider Your Introduction
- •Consider Your Thesis
- •Consider Your Structure
- •Consider Your Paragraphs
- •Consider Your Argument and Its Logic
- •Read your paper out loud.
- •Get a second reader.
- •Be a second reader.
- •Visit rwit.
- •Logic and Argument
- •What is an Argument?
- •Understanding Formal Logic
- •Reviewing Your Argument's Evidence
- •Have you suppressed any facts?
- •Avoiding Logical Fallacies
- •Attending to Grammar
- •A Brief Introduction
- •Most Commonly Occurring Errors
- •Wrong/missing inflected ends.
- •Wrong/missing preposition.
- •Comma splice.
- •Subject-verb agreement.
- •Missing comma in a series.
- •Pronoun agreement error.
- •Unnecessary commas with restrictive clauses.
- •Dangling, misplaced modifier.
- •Its/it's error.
- •Becoming Your Own Grammar Tutor
- •First, determine whether the error is a matter of carelessness, or a pattern of error.
- •Second, prioritize among your errors.
- •Third, practice writing sentences.
- •And finally, understand that grammar counts.
- •The Basic Principles of the Sentence Principle One: Focus on Actors and Actions
- •Principle Two: Be Concrete
- •Nouns often require prepositions.
- •Abstract nouns often invite the "there is" construction.
- •Abstract nouns are, well, abstract.
- •Abstract nouns can obscure your logic.
- •Principle Two, The Exception: Abstract Nouns & When To Use Them.
- •Principle Three: Be Concise
- •Principle Four: Be Coherent
- •Is your topic also the subject of your sentence?
- •Are the topics/subjects of your sentences consistent?
- •Have you marked, when appropriate, the transitions between ideas?
- •Principle Five: Be Emphatic
- •Students' Advice for Students Sharon Stanley '99 writes on Clarity
- •Ross Wilken '99 writes on Revision and the importance of starting early
- •Ashley Brown '00 writes on Writing as a process
- •Louisa Gilder '00 writes on The importance of being personally invested in your writing
- •Leda Eizenberg '00 writes on The value of outlining after you write
- •Rita Mitchell '00 writes on Clarity
- •Christina Krettecos '00 writes on The writing process
- •Kinohi Nishikawa '01 writes on The importance of getting personally involved with your writing
- •Nils Arvold '00 writes on Things that work for him
- •Julia Henneberry '99 writes on Voice and tone, and the importance of reading other people's papers
- •Lauren Allan-Vail '99 shares a few thoughts on writing
- •Andrew Berglund '00 writes on The importance of clear logic
- •Karen Meteyer '99 writes on The importance of starting early
What is a Working Thesis Sentence?
Let's take a minute to define this term.
A thesis sentence, as we've said, is a kind of contract between you and your reader. It asserts, controls, and structures your argument for your reader's ease. A working thesis sentence, on the other hand, is a sentence that you compose in order to make the work of writing easier. It's a sentence that asserts, controls, and structures the argument for you.
The working thesis need not be eloquent. In fact, it can be quite clunky, declaring your argument and then clumsily listing your supporting points. Not to worry: you'll be revising your thesis, and often more than once.
Remember that, as you write, you are bound to come up with new ideas and observations that you'd like to incorporate into your paper. Every time you make a new discovery, your thesis sentence will have to be revised. Sometimes you'll find that you're stuck in your writing. You may need to return to your thesis. Perhaps you haven't clearly defined an important term or condition in your thesis? Maybe that's why you find yourself unable to progress beyond a certain point in your argument?
Revising your working thesis at this juncture could help you to clarify for yourself the direction of your argument. Don't be afraid to revise! In fact, the most important quality of a working thesis sentence is its flexibility. A working thesis needs to keep up with your thinking. It needs to accommodate what you learn as you go along.
Revising the Working Thesis
Let's return now to our in-progress thesis: "In X's novel, the characters' seemingly insignificant use of lipstick in fact points to one of the novel's larger themes: the masking and unmasking of the self." Perhaps this thesis served you well as you were writing the first couple of pages of your paper, but now that you are into the meat of the matter, you are stuck. How, exactly, is the writer using lipstick and masks to reveal character? And what, precisely, is his point in doing so?
It's at this juncture that you'll probably return to your thesis and discover a) what it doesn't say, and b) what it needs to say. We've already determined that the sentence doesn't really address the most arguable - and interesting - aspect of this argument. Now it's time to ask yourself why this hasn't been addressed. Perhaps you, the writer, haven't yet articulated this part of the argument for yourself? Is this why the thesis (and with it, the paper) seems to trail off?
At this point you should stop drafting the paper and return to the text. Read a bit. Brainstorm a bit. Write another discovery draft. Read a bit more. Ohmygosh! Here is something interesting. You've found a passage in which the writer talks about how the lipstick left behind on a lover's shirt "drew a map for his wife into the dark lands of his infidelities." And you've found another passage in which the jilted lover's bright orange lipstick was "like a road sign, guiding her betrayer to the heart of her pain." In these two passages you see the writer addressing another function of lipstick: that women use it to draw a kind of map. You look for other lipstick examples that might shed more light on the idea of mapping, and you find them. Even better, you discover that all of these examples have something to do with betrayal, guilt, and shame.
In the end, you conclude that lipstick is not being used in this novel just to mask and unmask. Women also use lipstick to map. The two are in fact linked:
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Lipstick masks by concealing real feelings (most often feelings of betrayal, guilt, and shame).
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Lipstick masks, but in the process reveals or creates a new persona, one who overcomes the feelings of betrayal, guilt, and shame.
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The author also uses the act of putting on lipstick as a metaphor for mapping. These maps might conceal - that is, they might serve to detour the observer from discovering (or arriving at) the woman's feelings of betrayal, or
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They might reveal. First, lipstick might draw a map to the truth about a betrayal, as they do for the betrayed wife in the novel. And second, lipstick might be seen as a tool with which a woman maps herself, drawing new borders, re-imagining her own inner landscapes, and re-routing her own destiny.
This idea is very complicated. How do you make a thesis out of this?
Your first try is bound to be clumsy. You need to find a way of putting together all of your important ideas - lipsticks, masks, maps, concealing, revealing, betrayal - into one sentence. Can it be done?
Maybe; maybe not. Let's try:
While lipstick is used in X's novel to conceal feelings of betrayal, it is also used to reveal the betrayal itself, in that lipstick both masks and maps betrayal, at first allowing women to hide themselves, but later providing them with the possibility to create new selves, and to re-route their lives.
Does this sentence work?