CIE100: Common Intellectual Experience - Thesis Workshop (10 Points)

Assignment Goals

The goals of this assignment are:
  1. To draft a working thesis early enough that it can still change
  2. To test a thesis against explicit, repeatable criteria
  3. To diagnose weak theses by deliberately writing one
  4. To name the conversation an essay enters before entering it

The Assignment

Purpose

Before each essay, this short workshop asks you to draft a working thesis — working, because its job is to be improved, not defended. A thesis written the night before a draft is due can only be obeyed; a thesis written now can be tested, argued with, and replaced, which is the entire advantage. This is a standalone mini-assignment: it prepares you for the upcoming essay without changing anything about the essay assignment itself.

Task

Write your response in three parts (roughly a 1-2 paragraph equivalent in total) and submit it through Canvas before the start of class:

  1. The working thesis. One or two sentences stating the argument you currently intend the upcoming essay to make.

  2. The test. Check your thesis against the four criteria below, with one sentence of self-assessment for each:
    • Arguable: could a reasonable person who has done the reading disagree with it? If everyone would nod, it is a summary wearing a thesis’s clothes.
    • Specific: does it name the texts it is about and the relationship it claims between them (extends, complicates, contradicts, reframes)?
    • Provable: could it be supported with quotable evidence from the texts — actual passages you could put on the page?
    • Consequential: does it answer “so what?” — why would the argument matter to someone who is not being graded on it?
  3. The deliberately weaker version. Rewrite your own thesis as a worse thesis on purpose, then diagnose in 2-3 sentences exactly why it is weaker: too broad, unfalsifiable, or summary-not-argument. Learning to see the failure modes in a thesis you built is the fastest way to stop building them by accident.

Close with the “they say / I say” move: one sentence naming the conversation your thesis enters — what “they say” (a reading, a common view, a claim from one of our texts) that your thesis answers (Graff, G. and Birkenstein, C., “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, W. W. Norton).

Criteria

A strong response has a thesis that survives (or is honestly revised by) all four tests, a weaker version that is genuinely diagnosable rather than a strawman of a strawman, and a “they say” sentence that names a real position rather than “some people think.”

Formats (UDL)

You may render your response as prose, as a labeled list (thesis, four one-sentence tests, weaker version plus diagnosis, “they say” sentence), or as a two-column table (criterion and self-assessment), as long as all parts are present.

See also: Evidence Workshop (/Participation/EvidenceWorkshop) and Counterargument and Concession (/Participation/Counterargument), this workshop’s pre-draft companions, and the argument-building section of How to Read Hard Texts in CIE (/Assignments/ReadingGuide).

Submission

Submit a word processed or PDF document through Canvas before the start of class.

Please refer to the Style Guide for code quality examples and guidelines.