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. I call it a working thesis because its job is to get better, and you can’t improve a thesis you wrote the night before the draft is due. You can only obey it. Write one now and you can still test it, argue with it, and throw it out. This is a standalone mini-assignment, so 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 just nod along, you’ve written a summary.
    • Specific: does it name the texts it is about, and the relationship it claims between them (extends, complicates, contradicts, reframes)?
    • Provable: could you support it with quotable evidence from the texts, meaning actual passages you could put on the page?
    • Consequential: does it answer “so what?” In other words, why would this argument matter to someone who is not being graded on it?
  3. The weaker version, on purpose. Rewrite your own thesis as a worse thesis, then diagnose in 2-3 sentences exactly why it is weaker. Is it too broad? Unfalsifiable? Summary instead of argument? Once you can see how a thesis fails in one you built yourself, you’ll start catching it in your own drafts.

Close with the “they say / I say” move. Write one sentence naming the conversation your thesis enters, meaning 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 all four tests, or one you honestly revise because of them. Its weaker version is one you can actually diagnose, and its “they say” sentence names a real position instead of “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 and Counterargument and Concession, this workshop’s pre-draft companions, and the argument-building section of How to Read Hard Texts in CIE.

Submission

Please 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.