Because the thesis statement can make or break your paper, here is a little rundown of
how I might approach the process of nailing my thesis statement. This example is based
on a novel we're not reading together, but you can extract the basic process and the
pointers and apply them to your own topic.
Having read it, discussed it, and thought a lot about it, I have a general topic, pretty much a
hypothesis, that I want to pursue in writing my term paper on Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake:
that Lahiri uses concepts of geographical place as one way of talking about identity. That much is
an observation, a kind of hypothesis that will be enough to get me going. The next step is to do
some research to find out what other literary scholars have had to say about the novel, about
Lahiri’s other writing, or about the topic as it has been approached by other authors.
So, thinking about identity and geography, and conducting a search in the subscription databases
available through the UML library's webpage, I came across an article, "Diasporic Self, Cultural
Other: Negotiating Ethnicity through Transformation in the Fiction of Tan and Kingston” (written
by a scholar named Li Zeng) that addressed some similar issues, though specifically in relation to
how such issues are addressed by two Chinese-American writers. (There is fertile ground in
articles not directly on the primary text you’re writing about!)
Among other passages in the analysis of these Chinese-American writers' novels, one little bit
struck me as I was reading the article. On page 10, the author of the article, Li Zeng, is talking
about "Whittman," a character in Maxine Hong Kingston's novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book:
"Whittman's collision with the American mainstream in the novel, as exemplified above, reveals
the deep rift in American society between the core and the periphery and the fine line between
stereotyped identities and true ethnic identities." This passage might not mean anything in
relation to Kingston's novel if you haven't read it, but if you've read The Namesake, the ideas are
still familiar. What's great about doing the work of finding this essay, though, is that these words
help us put new words to our ideas, and help us by considering what someone else is thinking
about ideas that are close to our own, or about things we're wondering about and haven't yet put
words to. That's why we research!
So, integrating Zeng's idea with my own, I start to think about the difference in our ideas. She is
not really talking about physical locations the way I am, but I think it's the phrase "deep rift" that
attracts me to this passage. Also, she's making a point about stereotypes that I'm finding very
useful, and which I wasn't really factoring in: that the discomfort of having a particular ethnic
identity in a particular location comes in part from the existence of stereotypes that make ethnic
identity problematic and which exist not in the individual's mind but in the broader culture
represented by that place. Hmm! So now I'm thinking about a moment in The Namesake that takes
place at the kindergarten, and thinking about how charged it is with the principal's stereotypical
preconception that Ashoke cannot speak English well, and that that prejudice pervades both
Ashoke's and Gogol's attitude about the location, the school, which stands in for authority and a
point of necessary assimilation into a specifically American order.
Given that it's made me think differently about my own idea, I might want to lean on Zeng's
assessment as a way of taking my own argument to the next level. To do that, to use that
scholarship as a springboard for my own argument, I might paraphrase her, or I might
quote her directly. If I quoted, I'd chop out the bits that make sense only in relation to Kingston
or to Chinese-American literature, and would explicitly apply it directly to Lahiri. In either case, I
would provide parenthetical in-text citation according to MLA standards, which are found at
<http://dianahacker.com/resdoc/p04_c08_s1.html>.
Most importantly -- and I can't say this with enough emphasis -- MY idea -- not Zeng's -- is the
most important thing in this, for the purposes of my paper. At no point should the research
material you have gathered overshadow your argument. If your research has been so mindaltering that it has led you to change your thesis, that's fine, but make sure you write your own
thesis, that you are in charge of the argument from start to finish, and that you RESIST THE
TEMPTATION to put your ideas in the hands of others by over-quoting and over-relying on your
secondary sources.
The works cited entry for this article, by the way, would be listed alphabetically in my list of works
cited, and would look like this (assuming the page margins made breaks where I've manually
inserted returns in here, and that the indentation has been preserved – look at the examples on
the Hacker website to make sure):
Zeng, Li. "Diasporic Self, Cultural Other: Negotiating Ethnicity through
Transformation in the Fiction of Tan and Kingston." Language &
Literature 28 (2003): 1-15. Academic Search Premier. Ebscohost.
UMass Lowell lib., 5 April 2006 <http://search.epnet.com>.
If the details of how I sorted out this citation format are unclear to you, see the guidelines for MLA
citation at <http://dianahacker.com/resdoc/p04_c08_s2.html> and look at two items in the dropdown menu: #21, "Article in a journal paginated by volume" and, because I found the article by
searching in the library's electronic subscription databases, #31, "Work from a service such as
InfoTrac." Note: italics are equivalent to underlining.
In my searching, I found a number of such sources that I think will help me, including the one by
Zeng and others. I’ve read them and made note about important ideas and passages that I think
will be relevant as I draft my paper. Because I’m getting ready to draft, and I have a lot of ideas in
my head, I need to sharpen up my thesis.
(I'm going through these motions, by the way, because of how typical it is for the thesis to be a
critically weak link in the writing process.) I'm urging you once again, here, to be very tough on
yourself with respect to your thesis, because it can truly make your efforts fruitful or frustrating,
and I'd much prefer you experience the former than the latter!
So, first, let me see what's separating my hypothesis from a workable thesis. The main question
literary analysis requires us to address is "WHY?"; if I only ask "how" something happens in a
novel, or heaven forfend, "what" happens, I'm not doing analysis at all. Here are two quick
examples of how I could go astray with this, even when I'm sticking to the basic idea:
BAD THESIS ALERT!: In The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri emphasizes the importance that a sense
of home has for her characters.
What's so wrong with that? I could easily fulfill its promise by simply giving a bunch of examples
of points in the novel where I see that phenomenon occurring. This is what amounts to pointing
and saying, "Look! There it is! And there it is again!" It doesn't promise anything other than
enumeration. A paper following this thesis runs a serious risk of only telling me what happens: i.e.,
plot! I still need to ask why this is significant.
The other bad extreme of the spectrum is a thesis that doesn't tell what happens, but tells only
how it's done:
BAD THESIS ALERT!: In The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri uses many images that contribute to
making the characters feel at home in their surroundings.
What's so wrong with that? Again, I'm not required to perform analysis in order to do exactly what
the thesis is promising. I could easily write a paper that consists of a demonstration of a lot of
examples of imagery related to the idea of home. I would be perfectly correct, but that won't make
it analysis. I still need to ask why these images matter when I go back to considering the novel as
a whole.
Please give some serious consideration to whether your thesis exhibits either of these
tendencies. While a decent paper -- and even some analysis -- can sometimes emerge in the
wake of a weak thesis (and, conversely, a good thesis doesn't guarantee a good paper), it's far
more likely that a good thesis and a good paper will coincide! I want the structure of your paper to
be sound, and a solid, explicit thesis is fundamental to that structure.
So, what does the "good" version of this thesis look like? How will you recognize it if you have it?
Well, again, you want to be sure that the "why" question is going to be addressed. My happy
College Writing formula for drafting out and double-checking an argumentative/analytical thesis -which is still pertinent to more advanced writing projects --goes like this:
In W, X uses Y in order to (convey) Z.
W=title, X=author, Y=technique Z=theme.
That formula, as dumb and oversimplified as it is, at least makes sure you're getting to the
question of "WHY?" and also requires you to be explicit in terms of each of the elements you're
inserting in place of the variables. Looking back, can you see how the two "bad" theses above are
missing either a Z or a Y? Now, granted, it doesn't make for much fancy (or even marginally
good-sounding) writing, and to get to anything even slightly complicated, you will need more
sentences, more room for your ideas to expand, but this is one way to check things out before
you get in too far. So, let me try plugging in:
MEDIOCRE THESIS ALERT!: In The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri uses concepts of geographical
place, including a series of images that characters associate with their homes, in order to convey
the full range of impact that location has on the identities of her characters, both immigrants and
native-born Americans.
Right, so that's no great shakes -- mostly because it's a bit vague and doesn't really address the
specificity of the novel's content -- but, still, it's got the basic components in place, and it's
certainly asking for something more than enumeration. It's making an interpretive claim, stating
what I think is the thematic significance of what I've read: that all of the examples that I can point
to add up to something, and that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Having this much means I will probably be able to move forward, even though I will need to come
back and revise to make this mediocre thesis something more specific, effective and energetic.