Beware the Split Thesis

I panic a little when I see words and phrases like “and” and “as well as” in thesis statements.

I say a little because there are plenty of acceptable ways to use these in a thesis, but there are also examples that amount to “This essay is about Topic A... and it's also about Topic B.” Consider the following:

This essay will analyze the breeding practices and training techniques of bichon frises and golden retrievers.

This is a split thesis. The difference here is there isn't anything to suggest why these two things, joined by the “and” are being brought together: What do breeding practices and training have to do with one another? Why these dogs? Why not throw the dog's diet and health problems in there, too? What about corgis and papillons, or poodles and labradors?

Tangential Topics

I think this problem stems from writers having a few related topics but never developing a significant correlation between them. They go through the brainstorming steps, the six journalistic questions, mind mapping, etc, and figure out their overall topic and the subtopics for their essays. In doing so, they find a couple of things they want to address, without exploring a reason to do both. A stronger thesis would be

Different breeds of dog require different training techniques; a hunting dog, like a golden retriever, will need a different training regimen than a smaller lap dog, like a bichon frise.

Note that the topics didn’t change, but it's no longer a thesis about training and breeding golden retrievers and bichon frises. Now it's a thesis that compares and contrasts training techniques for broader types of dogs.

Just because two topics are remotely related does not mean it is appropriate to write about both in the same essay. After all, the more specific you are, the further apart your different topics can become. Sometimes, you do need to broaden your topic.

Broadening to Consolidating

This does not mean you can take step after step back until you have “Dogs are interesting” as a thesis. Instead, it means recognizing you can get so specific you can't reconcile your different topics and you're left with a thesis that lists specific topics, and two essays pieced, Frankenstein-style, into one another.

Broadening happens so you can bring together similarities (or contrast differences) to specify your topic. If you're writing about dog training and dog breeding, you're writing about two broad topics. If you're writing about how to train dogs based on their different breeds, it’s probably going to be a single, solid essay. The reason for this is because you're not writing about these two topics, but instead the ways they intersect.

Just as this issue can stem from using certain words in the thesis, it can be solved by introducing other words. For example, saying you are going to compare and contrast suggests you are going to identify similarities and differences and come to a conclusion that weighs both topics against one another. Switching conjunctions can change the overall meaning: However suggests the relationship you’re identifying is based on a shift in ideas or expectations. Therefore suggests a causal relationship because one thing is one way, and the other thing directly correlates.

Conclusion

This is not to say that switching one set of conjunctions with another will solve your problems, nor is it to say that having “and” in a thesis will guarantee a bad thesis and “therefore” will guarantee a good one. The words we choose convey a lot of meaning no matter where they show up, but especially in a thesis.

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Works Cited

"AG Cody" by Rocktendo - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AG_Cody.jpg#/media/File:AG_Cody.jpg

"Golden retriever dummytraining" by Dirk Vorderstraße - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golden_retriever_dummytraining.jpg#/media/File:Golden_retriever_dummytraining.jpg

"PembrokeWelshCorgi Tryst.fullres". Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PembrokeWelshCorgi_Tryst.fullres.jpg#/media/File:PembrokeWelshCorgi_Tryst.fullres.jpg

Take a Thesis along

Think of a swamp. A noisome mass of life and liquid you'd rather not deal with. You'll probably want to get out as quickly as possible. If you forge ahead, then you have to hold your breath and try your luck. And there's nothing to let you know where you should be going.

That's an essay without a thesis: an entanglement of information that may be beneficial but it isn't clear how. Without something to indicate how to get through the quagmire, you'll end up lost and confused. A well crafted thesis in a well written introduction will give a piece of writing purpose and make it comprehensible for your reader.

"Cypresses"

A thesis is a one (or two) sentence statement of what you are trying to do in your essay. Drafting these sentences forces you to identify the relationship between your topics: how they influence one another, refine your overall topic, and what significant thing you have to say that brings everything together. You have to think about the entire essay and what conclusions you make and what your purpose is in writing the essay. This sounds like a daunting task, but if you use the six journalistic questions to sort out and clarify what you’re writing about, drafting a thesis and adhering to it can be much easier.

My other posts on the six journalistic questions deal with amassing ideas, but you need to figure out how and why you are bringing them all together for a thesis. For example, you may say you are interested in silent film and in pharmaceuticals. Two valid topics with nothing to do with one another (at least no connection I can figure out). Writing a thesis forces you to take these different things and explain, in about as succinct a way as possible, what they have to do with one another

The thesis gives you a way to make your responses to the Six Journalistic Questions more pertinent and interconnected as you say you are going to “compare and contrast this and that,” or “demonstrate how this can help resolve such and such an issue.” That lets the reader know what you are writing about, but also how you are using the information.

A thesis lets the reader know what to expect from the essay: what information you are dealing with and how you are dealing with it. It can be easy to slosh from paragraph to paragraph, but then you're leading your reader through an information quagmire. Make sure you have refined your topic and that your thesis shows up early and clearly enough that, no matter how messy the essay may be, there's something to give it purpose.

"Saltpancrk12"

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Works Cited

"Cypresses". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cypresses.jpg#/media/File:Cypresses.jpg

"Saltpancrk12" by Adam.J.W.C. - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saltpancrk12.jpg#/media/File:Saltpancrk12.jpg

You Aren’t Qualified to Talk About “Mankind”, Part 2

Last week, I posted about how using grandiose statements like “mankind,” “humanity,” and “the dawn of time” can severely hurt a piece of writing. This week, I am posting about how doing this can hurt your appearance as a writer.

Taking it Seriously

Sometimes we encounter broad, vague statements in advertisements or editorials. These aren't serious research pieces; they rely on exaggeration and hyperbole to get an audience reaction as fast as possible. We're willing to give these situations some breathing room because they're not providing solid and conclusive facts: these genres have other motives.

Research is serious. We can forgive an advertiser peddling a product, and we can forgive a hastily written piece driven more by subjectivity than objectivity. But when it comes down to serious research and learning the finer nuances of major social or academic issues, there's none of that subjective breathing room. Serious research is a time for specificity and concrete research to back it up.

Poor Research

If you're trying to talk about how something has been a certain way since “time immemorial” then there is missing research. This is particularly interesting when I get essays on topics like dentistry or computers: stuff that, however primitive it may have been in its inception, had some beginning in recorded history.

Just think how that sounds. “Mankind has exhibited an irrational fear of dentists for all time.” Or even worse, “Man has eaten bread since the dawn of time.”

Some topics, like food, are extremely old. I think it's safe to say earliest man, in whatever form, consumed something for sustenance, but a lot had to happen before bread. But if I were to start making claims about frequency of meals, dieting habits, or the nature of hunting, gathering, and the shift to agriculture that allowed for bread, I had better have access to the studies on skeletal remains of these ancient humans, the test results showing the composition of the remains, and at least a dozen other broad fields of knowledge that I'm unaware of because I haven't and don't study prehistoric man and his lifestyle habits.

False Authority

Returning to Professor Jared Diamond and issues of authority. It takes a lot of time, research, and devotion to any discipline to be able to authoritatively discuss it, let alone its entire history. Such experts are also familiar enough with their disciplines to be able to affix more specific details in terms of time, place, and the demographics in question. They know it’s never as simple as “all of human history” and will demonstrate that knowledge in their writing.

This means that, while it may sound authoritative to express a history-spanning knowledge of something, it actually shows you do not have a solid enough base of information to understand the discipline is complex. It also degrades the work of professional researchers like Dr. Jared Diamond who devote their lives to their fields. It degrades your presentation by suggesting you haven’t done sufficient research. It degrades yourself because it shows you don't take it seriously enough to be talking about it in the first place, and you rely on cliches and cheap rhetoric to defend your ideas more than concrete evidence. It is a presentation of false authority and disrespects those who can address it authoritatively.

Conclusion

Be respectful of your discipline and researched subject matter. Recognize and understand whatever you are researching is far more complex than you think it is, and a failure to recognize that complexity shows a failure as a researcher and as a writer. It may seem like a good idea to bolster a piece of writing with hyperbole and all-encompassing statements, but relying on them will do more to harm to your credibility as a writer than it will ever help you.

You Aren’t Qualified to Talk About “Mankind”, Part 1

I want to start this post off by talking about a man named Jared Diamond. 

Dr. Diamond earned his PhD at Cambridge and is a professor of geography at UCLA. He is perhaps most famous for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, wherein he postulates how Europeans were able to colonize the extent they did because of issued based on agriculture. It’s a fascinating book and interesting premise based on thirty years of research done after Diamond was a PhD carrying professor.

I bring this up not to discuss Professor Diamond’s premise or conclusions, but to address how he is one of very few individuals who has earned the privilege to talk about “mankind”. Compare it to Albert Einstein or Dr. Stephen Hawking talking about “time.” Being able to talk about monumental ideas represents the accumulation of years of research, education, and training. These people are in positions of authority to address topics normally beyond the reach of some professional scholars, let alone newcomers.

And yet, people say and write cliches like “man has always” and “since the dawn of time” on a regular basis. The simple fact is they shouldn’t. This stems back to what I wrote last week about making unqualified or broad claims. If you say something about “time immemorial” or how “humanity has always” you need a lot of math, artifacts, or research to substantiate it. And that's just the start.

Introductions and Impossible Expectations

I tell my students an introduction is a promise to the reader. In so many words, you give a brief but precise overview of the key subjects that will be addressed, culminating in the thesis. From there, a reader trusts what is in the introduction will be addressed in the essay. So, when a writer mentions “humanity,”it creates an expectation “humanity” is going to be one of the guiding topics of the essay.

Most research essays I assign students are three to six double spaced pages, and that isn’t enough space to write anything conclusive or argumentative about the expanse that is “humanity.” Once my students drop the cliche, they move on and get closer to their topic, never again returning to issues regarding “humanity”. They have set up an impossible expectation for themselves, especially when the topic of the essay is not on mankind or time, but is rather on more basic issues, like shoes.

Everything is Relevant

The only excuse I can think of to introduce “time immemorial” into an essay is a fancy way to lazily say “I can write about anything and it’ll work,” as if to claim there is no way to run out of stuff to write about. For example, an essay on “The History of Music” could start off with assumptions about prehistoric man banging sticks together, and then move to a discussion of representations of music in the middle ages, before discussing Bach, the Beatles, and Beck.

This is not an essay I have received, but just thinking about it makes me cringe.

The problem is, when you give yourself such a wide breadth as “the history of music” you will end up saying, at best, a few unrelated things about tangentially related topics. This will lead to an essay bereft of thesis, organization, and coherence. Maybe you could draw significant connections between medieval music, Bach, the Beatles, and Beck, but if you did, you won’t be writing about the history of music. You’ll be writing about the connections between them.

Conclusion

This is just a start of the reasons why using such all-encompassing hyperbolic statements are bad when structuring and writing your piece, but there’s more to it than that. It also makes you look bad as a writer and researcher.

More on that next week.