What was the most important idea that you took away from the reading in the title of the post? Why did you find it important and how did it shift your perspective on writing a thesis? Your response should be at least three sentences long.
6 thoughts on “Blog Post #15: Takeaway from “Stasis Theory…” (pp. 203-208)”
Comments are closed.
One thing I took from the reading is to think beyond your professor when writing. This stood out to me because it helps to envision the argument relevant to the world today, instead of how it will be perceived by the professor. This helped me make my thesis by thinking more broadly and how the argument will affect most people.
The most important idea that I took away from the reading was the process of composing the thesis for the paper. The author gave an example in the book on writing about climate change. She wrote that if the targeted audience does not even believe that climate change exists, she would have to then direct her thesis and argument on proving climate change with facts. What I learned from this reading is that I would have to first identify my goal in this argumentative paper. Is it to define something, is it to prove something (as fact/ if it happened / still happening), what should be done etc. and focus my thesis on answering these questions.
For me, the breakdown of the five categories of claims included in the stasis theory was the main takeaway. Some topics come with a wide variety of lenses to look at the issue and sometimes I think writers try to fulfill more than one claim in their papers. This is definitely something I’ll keep in mind since I feel like I’m so used to defining the problem, talking about the nature of it, the current situation and then the solution.
Writing for an audience and not just only the professor was something I wanna rarely thought about. There can be a great disparity when writing to add value to the discourse than to just get a good grade. Any discourse is filled with different opinions, the author illustrates this when talking about climate change. When talking about the topic of climate change, he illustrates how particular statements can be nebulous to the other side of the argument. Reading this made me be aware that I should implement definitions and explanations to any stamens I make about the impact of immigration on the U.S economy.
Something that stood out to me was that our topic shouldn’t be so broad because then our thesis statement would be too. Ive never thought about it that way until now. As well as that when I write an essay I always think i’m writing this to for my professor not an audience. I found these two points important because, now I feel like my thesis statement will be stronger as well as my whole essay.
I took away from this reading how to test different thesis statements. I’ve never tried the method in this section that uses different claims to approach a thesis; usually, I just write one over and over until it seems right. Situating your thesis to a claim can not only help along the thesis statement, but also orient where your writing is heading as the thesis sets the tone for the whole paper.