I think we all dread the word “thesis.” We know we should be
familiar with it. After all, we’re in college, and the professor just said we
needed one and didn’t bother to explain how we go about getting one. Not to
mention, even for those of us who are perfectly aware of what a thesis is, a
thesis still requires hard work—it requires specificity and expertise on a
subject and then being able to translate “everything you know” in a concise
manner to your audience.
But you can’t think about it that way. You can’t think about
the “everything” you know, all the information the articles and books have
bombarded you with. You have to think about what “everything” consists of. After
all, the thesis is essentially the preview of the paper (the main points and
the purpose of them). Therefore, I like to think about the thesis as an
addition problem or a recipe. You want to add up all the main points (or
ingredients) to express a larger purpose. The main points should contribute to
and support that purpose. They should be relevant.
For example, if you hand someone a recipe for baking “the best cake on earth”
you would not include a paragraph about relieving the bowl and spoon of the leftover
batter. It is irrelevant to the overall purpose, which is to make “the best
cake on earth.” Licking the bowl and spoon to their bones will not impact the
quality of the cake that is currently in the oven. And in your thesis, you want
to limit the main points to those influential ingredients—the ingredients that
make “the best cake on earth.”
But how do you know what those ingredients are?
Well, there is no foolproof method to identifying such
ingredients. You often have to experiment with the writing process just like
you’d have to experiment with ingredients in the kitchen. And with
experimentation comes trial and error. You may rewrite the thesis three times,
because the more you wade through your topic, the farther away you’ll move from
your initial thoughts and conclusions and the better the cake will become.
Preheat the oven with some prewriting.
To depart from my biases about a particular topic, I do some
prewriting to generate a working (rough) thesis. I’d suggest making an outline,
because this gets you thinking about cause and effect (or how one main point
connects to another and so on) as well as organization, which is vital to any
paper. The “outline” (I use the term very
loosely) does not have to be perfect or even formatted correctly as you’ll see
in my example below. Welcome to the beautiful world of prewriting—anything
goes.
While outlining, I tend to focus on the body paragraphs
first. Without locating and submersing myself in the main points, the details,
and the source material, I probably haven’t gotten to the heart of why I’m
writing this paper yet.
You will want to organize the body of your outline by idea
and then integrate the appropriate sources to complement those ideas. The main
points you will use in your thesis will be more accessible this way. My body
paragraphs will include an idea about my topic that already exists, sources
that support that idea, and a reflection on that idea (why I feel it works or
doesn’t work).
Creating the Recipe: An Example of a “Working Thesis”
Step 1) Take a good look at your topic. Figure out what kind of cake you want to bake.
Topic: When is art not really art?
For this topic, I feel like I would have to be able to
define what art is to be able to
distinguish what it is not. I feel
like I would also have to narrow it down and choose one type of art to focus
on.
Revised topic: How do we define literary art?
Step 2) Brainstorm main points.
What ingredients will you need?
Body paragraph 1: Art should convey some sort of
message. It should promote a lesson. It should make a statement. I would use
Dante’s Inferno to express how this
supposed “literary masterpiece” was used to put the “fear of God” in its
readers. I would then reflect on this. I think the Inferno was giving the reader too much of the author’s opinion and
not allowing for enough of the reader’s opinion. I think there has to be more
of an interaction between the work of art and the art appreciator. I think the
artist should try to bring something to his/her audience’s attention, but not
necessarily comment on it. I think Ezra Pound said something like that.
Body paragraph 2: Art has to be beautiful or appeal
to the senses, but not necessarily be meaningful. I would then probably
incorporate Oscar Wilde’s opinion on art in his novel A Picture of Dorian Gray (“the artist is the creator of beautiful
things” and “all art is quite useless”) to support this definition of art
(Wilde 1,2). But then again, that would imply that beauty is not useful… I’m
still not quite sold on this definition of art either. I have a hard time
believing that art is useless when so much of it deals with the human
condition. At the very least, it functions as a form of entertainment. And we
use “art” as a window into the past. We can learn much about our history
through art. For instance, renaissance art marks the rebirth of humanism, and
through that art we can see man become more confident in himself (look at
Donatello’s David versus Michelangelo’s).
Body paragraph 3: Aristotle would certainly disagree
with Wilde as he discusses in his Poetics
that art is used to release emotion, “imitate action,” and derive pleasure
from empathy (being able to understand one another) (61). I would probably then
go on to use an example from literature—maybe something from Shakespeare or the
example Aristotle uses which is Oedipus
Rex or something other than a play to show how literature meets those requirements.
Overall, though, it seems that art serves a purpose more often than not.
Step 3) Tackle the intro (most importantly, the thesis). Taste
test. Bite into the cake. Reflect. What ingredients worked best? Which could
you leave out next time? Is there any you’d add? Blend your findings.
Rough Intro: It’s hard to provide specific rules for something that prides
itself on breaking the rules; however, the definition of art seems to depend on
the circumstance. It seems not everything works for a single circumstance, but
there seems to be a circumstance for everything to work. Rough thesis (working thesis):
That being said, for literature
to be considered art, certain general
criteria must be met: there must be unity and consistency throughout the work
even if it is consistently inconsistent, and it must put the human condition
under a microscope in order to provide a thorough observation of it.
In this case, I discussed and synthesized some of the
theories and opinions about art that have already been established (main
points/body paragraphs) to construct a conclusion of my own on the matter
(purpose/thesis).
Step 4) Begin the paper. Perfect the recipe. Re-make the cake.
When you begin that first draft, you are taking what you
learned from the prewriting stage, applying it to the paper and working out the
kinks. In other words, you are perfecting/revising the recipe for your cake.
If I were to move forward with my topic and start writing
the actual paper, my thesis would undergo some tweaking, but my “working
thesis,” at least, gives me a focus to adhere to as I write the paper. And this
is only one example of a thesis. There are a variety of them that could work
for this topic with the given information.
Works Cited
Aristotle. Aristotle’s
Poetics. Trans. S.H. Butcher. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. The
Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003. Print.
