By Alexandra Watson
What makes a strong thesis?
Despite how important thesis statements are to academic writing, this question befuddles many student writers, and probably confounds a good number of professional academics as well. Student writers typically understand that a thesis statement should represent a main idea or point. Writing guides like Temple’s “5 Tips for Writing an Effective Thesis” provide helpful principles: a thesis should be substantial, supportable, precise, arguable, and relevant.
The unspoken criterion, but the one by which any reader inevitably judges our work, is whether the thesis is interesting.
But how do we define what is interesting? Mikhail Epstein devotes an entire essay to this very question, arguing that while of course what interests each of us is subjective, we can still use the interesting as a useful evaluative term for art and literature. Epstein describes an interesting theory as presenting “a consistent and plausible proof for what appears to be least probable” (Epstein, The Interesting). He goes on to describe the concept in surprisingly mathematical terms: “the interest of a theory is inversely proportional to the probability of its thesis and directly proportional to the provability of its argument.” In other words, the further a thesis goes from the obvious while still being provable, the more interesting it will be.
But how do we determine that a thesis is not obvious? This connects to another related criterion for a strong thesis, mentioned above—that it must be arguable. The easiest way to determine that a thesis is arguable is to identify counterarguments. So it often helps to work backwards, to think first about the antithesis, or what the Little Red Schoolhouse problem statement model calls the “status quo” perspective. Graff and Birkenstein highlight this method of identifying what the writing is responding to in their book They Say, I Say.
This move of identifying the obvious or status quo perspective seems easier when arguing about an issue—when we’re writing in response to a topic like gun or border control, or reproductive rights. We can easily imagine the common arguments for or against such issues, so our work in crafting an interesting thesis is to push against one of these pre-existing arguments in a way that’s not obvious but is provable.
But when we’re responding to a work of literature, or a piece of art, it becomes more difficult. Sometimes, we’re writing about texts or images that are well known, which makes the status quo perspective more easily imaginable (see David Orr’s “The Most Misread Poem in America” for an interesting reading of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”). But more often in academic contexts, we may feel like we’re writing in a vacuum surrounding a text.
Then, I find it helpful to think about a few resources that we often lose sight of:
- Classroom discussion. What have peers said about the text or artwork in discussion, and what did they miss that you might have seen?
- Our past selves. If we take notes in the margins of a reading on the first read, then re-read, we can take note of what we overlooked or misinterpreted in an earlier read.
- Imagining a less careful reader. What could be easily missed or misinterpreted if someone wasn’t reading as closely as we were?
By taking stock of these other readers and the possibility of their alternative readings, we can imagine the obvious and work hard to push against it, to make our claims more interesting.
Published on October 24, 2016
