Thesis Statement Assignment Requirements

English 10, §§ 16840 and 16857
Professor Waid
Teaching Assistant: Patrick Mooney
Email: patrickmooney AT umail DOT ucsb DOT edu
Spring 2013

Overview

These assignments are intended to give you practice in formulating an interesting, meaningful claim on which you can base an argument for your papers in the course. They are also intended to motivate you to think critically while performing your course-related reading (and, ideally, all of the reading that you do, actually). To do these assignments effectively, you will need to think, at least a bit, about what kind of paper you might build around the thesis statement that you're submitting: What will the actual argument be? What kinds of evidence would you do in order to support it? Why should we care about the argument in the first place?

Your thesis statements are by 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday of even-numbered weeks in the quarter (weeks 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10), and should be submitted to me by email. Thesis statement assignments are the only assignments for which I do not also require a printed copy.

You must submit all five thesis statements in order to receive a passing grade for the course. Late submission of a thesis statement will negatively impact your grade on that thesis statement. Except in genuinely extraordinary circumstances, I do not accept work more than two weeks late, or after the final exam. Failure to turn in a thesis statement within two weeks of its due date will result in automatic failure of the course itself, as it is necessary to complete all assignments in a timely fashion in order to pass.

Due Dates

• Tuesday, April 9: First thesis statement due by email before midnight..
• Tuesday, April 23: Second thesis statement due by email before midnight..
• Tuesday, May 7: Third thesis statement due by email before midnight..
• Tuesday, May 21: Fourth thesis statement due by email before midnight..
• Tuesday, June 4: Fifth thesis statement due by email before midnight..

So What Do I Have to Do?

At a minimum, you need to provide a single sentence that could serve as the thesis statement for a good college-level literature paper. If you find it helpful or necessary, you are also welcome to provide a few more sentences that help to contextualize your claim — perhaps a draft of an entire introductory paragraph (but no more than this). However, this is not necessary in order to satisfy the requirements of the thesis statement assignment — it is theoretically possible to get full credit just by sending me a well thought-out thesis statement. Your thesis statement may be about any text that we have read up to the point in the quarter when it is due, although you may not submit more than one thesis statement on the same text during the course of the quarter.

Your thesis statement should be sent to my email account (listed at the top of this page) with thesis statement #1, thesis statement #2, etc. in the subject line of your email. I would prefer that you include your thesis statement in the body of your email, rather than attaching a separate document containing your thesis statement.

So What Makes a Good Thesis Statement?

A good thesis statement should be:

• Specific. Say exactly what you mean, as specifically as you can. Avoid generalizations and engage with the specifics of the text.
• Objectively verifiable, at least theoretically. Avoid just stating your opinion or talking about your reactions to a text: you should be making a claim about the text itself and how we can read it productively. A good paper takes risks in its interpretation.
• Based in the text itself. Arguments about tangential issues tend to miss the point of writing assignments — you should be paying close attention to the specific language of the text(s) with which you're engaging, not simply, say, gossiping about the text's author.
• Focused. Dig into a specific aspect of the text with which you're engaging — you're not obligated to discuss the entire text, nor to summarize the plot, nor to say everything that you think and know about the text. Your thesis statement should express a specific argument about a novel/short story/poem/play/movie, not an overview of everything you know.
• Non-obvious and disputable. If it's something that no one would disagree with, then it's not worth writing a whole paper about.
• A clear indication of what your paper is "about." An honest argument declares its intentions up front. If you're depending on sleight of hand — say, holding off until the very end to make your main point — to make your argument look impressive, then you should think again about what it is that you're actually accomplishing with your paper.
• Clear about why it is relevant. Although I would never write So what? on a student paper, one of the things that I expect you will be doing in your papers is not simply jumping through an academic hoop to satisfy a course requirement, but rather that you will be modeling good writing practices that will be useful to you in your further academic, professional, and personal lives. Though I am a captive audience and am professionally obligated to read your papers, this will not be true of many of the readers of your future writing. Thinking about audience is an essential part of any writing task, and one of the most basic implicit questions that any piece of writing needs to address — directly or otherwise — is why the reader should care about the argument being made. It is not necessary to explicitly declare This is relevant because … or You should care because …, but your papers should show evidence that you have thought about this question.

Some Thesis Statements to Avoid

William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily is interesting.

This topic breaks violates basically every guideline in the last section. In terms of specificity: what's interesting about it? (Be more specific in the thesis statement itself.) In terms of objective verifiability and disputability: why should your reader care about your opinion of the text? In terms of being based in the text itself: what aspects of the text make it interesting? In terms of being focused: what parts of the text will you be concentrating on in your analysis? In terms of telegraphing the rest of your argument: what are you actually going to be talking about?

The main characters in William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily are Emily Grierson and Homer Barron.

All you're really demonstrating here is that you've read the text at least once. This is not a particularly disputable statement — almost any reader of the story is likely to agree that you're more or less right. Moreover, the thesis statement is vague: what do you mean by main characters? What are your criteria for deciding who the main characters are?

Perhaps more centrally, the two- or three-part thesis often suggests that you're not clear on what you're arguing, exactly. Often, this is because the writer has not yet fully transitioned from high school- to college-level writing, because the three-part thesis is a standard staple of high school-level essays. A high school-level essay generally asks you to demonstrate high school-level skills by summarizing information, and the three-part thesis is an effective way to demonstrate this: Three major causes of the Civil War were slavery, differing levels of economic development, and political disagreements. But in college, the assumption is that you have either already understood the text about which you're writing or have sought help in understanding it; it's not necessary to spend space proving this (although there are other productive ways to do so, and summaries can be helpful in certain very specific situations; also, making any real interpretive missteps that prove you haven't understood something important in your argument would hurt your grade). Instead, your argument should be analytical. If you feel like you need to list three things as part of your thesis, ask yourself what ties these three things together, or what kind of relationship they have, and why it's worthwhile to enumerate them in your thesis statement itself.

Since the dawn of time, literary scholars have admired William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily.

Besides being patently untrue (the dawn of time certainly occurred before the 1930 first publication of A Rose for Emily), this statement is vague. Which scholars? What do they admire, specifically? Why should your reader be interested in what these literary scholars think?

The dawn of time introduction is also characteristic of high school-level writing; it suggests that working to establish relevance by overstating the relevance of your thesis statement. It's not necessary to argue that everyone is interested in a subject for it to be interesting to your paper's audience.

How Are These Assignments Graded?

When you send me your thesis statement, you will receive an email back from me with one of the following grades (and with additional comments):

• Check-plus (100% of maximum possible credit; an A+). A thesis statement receiving this (comparatively rare) grade summarizes a perceptive argument and meets all or almost all of the criteria specified above for a good thesis statement. A check-plus means that a well-executed paper based around the submitted thesis statement is likely to be a productive investigation of the topic outlined by the thesis statement.
• Check (85% of maximum possible credit; a B). A solid effort that shows you have read and thought about the text(s) with which you are dealing, and have an idea for an argument that could conceivably be shaped into a solid paper.
• Check-minus (70% of maximum possible credit; a C-). The thesis statement addresses a text on the syllabus by making an effort to construct a claim about it, but the thesis statement, as worded, would be difficult to use as the central argument for a paper. It is likely that the thesis statement has at least one of the problems that have been outlined in earlier sections of this document. If you receive a check-minus on a thesis statement, you have the option of accepting the grade and moving on, or resubmitting a revised thesis statement within 72 hours, which will allow you to improve your grade to a maximum of "check" (85%).

What If I Have More Questions?

In general: think about how your thesis statement sums up your main argument and sets up the rest of your paper.

You might also look at the resources on GauchoSpace — there are several documents that discuss what makes for a good thesis statement.

Here are some other good resources about writing a good thesis statement:

• Thesis Statements at the Writing Center at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
• Tips on Writing a Thesis Statement from the Writing Center at Gustavus Adolphus College.
• Tips for Writing a Thesis Statement from Writing Tutorial Services at Indiana University, Bloomington.
• Creating a Thesis Statement from the Purdue University Online Writing Lab.

Or you can come talk to me! I am happy to discuss how you can better succeed on this assignment (as I am with other assignments).