By Diana Hamilton
In keeping with the work we’ve been doing to revise our practices and materials to better serve English language learners, Deepti (our Multilingual Writing Specialist) developed an additional resource for our “Developing Thesis Statements” workshop. This handout—“Useful Language for Thesis Statements”—groups template language for thesis statements by the kinds of argumentative work theses do.
In addition to providing the specific language academics use to frame claims, I’ve found that this document also helps students develop conceptual approaches to analysis they might not otherwise have been able to.
For example, one section provides templates for challenging a commonly held belief with a less obvious claim:
Keywords: While, Although, Though
While it is true that ___________, the more significant problem with X is…
Although it may seem that _________, the more significant issue relates to…
Though X seems to suggest that __________, a crucial part of this debate involves…
While I acknowledge that ___________, it is necessary to take into account…
While Garnett makes a strong case for the reproduction of Molotov Man, she fails to address the deeper problem of…
I’ve found this handout really useful in one-to-one sessions, as students of all language backgrounds benefit from access to the language writers use to analyze problems, texts, or data.
If the writer already has a draft of their thesis statement, I’ll ask them to try out reformulating it by adding a few frames from this document. They can establish evidence with a phrase like “Due to _______,” clarify their method with a phrase like “Based on the analysis of ________, I argue,” or strengthen their argument with words like “represents,” “illustrates” or “highlights” (all of which help them turn from questions about what happened, what are the facts here, to questions about how it happened, or how can we interpret these facts?)
Sometimes, writers struggle to adapt their ideas to these frames. If we’ve spent a long time drawing out their ideas together already, I might model a few ways they could apply it. For example, if they’re writing a research paper arguing that racism in hiring practices is largely unconscious, I’d first ask, “Is there any research you’ve found that disagrees with this argument, or writers you’ve encountered who argue otherwise?” Once they’ve answered, I might model aloud: “Although some scholars argue that workplaces remain homogenous because there aren’t enough qualified minority candidates, unconscious bias is actually the more significant impediment to hiring a diverse workforce.” In a recent session, this frame also helped the student come up with an outline for her paper’s structure—she realized she needed to introduce what other scholars argued early in the paper, a step she had previously left out.
If the writer has come in to draft a thesis statement, I’ll talk through a few examples from this handout to check for understanding before giving her some time to use these templates to generate ideas. While this step takes time, it helps the writer see the kinds of choices she can make in framing her argument—even, at times, to see the way sentence structure can limit or expand the kinds of arguments we can make.
Deepti told me about a recent session that demonstrated how this resource helped one student understand the kind of arguments her professors had been asking her to make:
One international student who I see every week expressed to me in a recent consultation that she does not understand the logic behind the choices she is expected to make in her writing. This makes her drafting process very tough as she is unable to get behind her professor’s suggested revisions as these simply don’t seem logical to her. The specific language in this document then gives such students a window into a logic that may at times seem foreign to them. So, by applying, “While it is true that ________, the more significant problem with X is…” to a paper, a student is learning that a U.S. reader or her professor would appreciate that she crafts an idea that is less immediately obvious or that is new in some way.
When students aren’t sure what their teachers mean by requests to “complicate” their claims, engage in a counterargument, clarify the stakes of their thesis, or support a claim with specific evidence, these frames can make the request more transparent.
Published April 29, 2016
