Your Thesis Offers Your "Take"

In today’s post, I want to revisit the idea of thesis because there’s really so much to say about it.  If you missed my first post on thesis, you can find it here. But, to recap, a thesis in an academic essay is a statement of your argument, or what you intend to demonstrate in your paper.  And that’s the point I wanted to emphasize in this post—a thesis is a statement of YOUR argument; it’s not a restatement of the argument being made by the author of the source you’re writing about.

One of my former colleagues at the Harvard College Writing Program helpfully described this as a “take,” – as in, you’ve read the assigned sources, but you need to have a take on them.  You need to bring your own insight or argument (about the sources) to the table.  Unless explicitly framed as such, most college-level writing assignments are not merely checks on whether you did the reading—the professor assumes you did the reading, and now she wants to know what you make of it.

This point sounds pretty straightforward, but it can be a hard lesson for students to grasp.  I think we spend so much time in education, especially in the early years, asking students to learn facts and regurgitate them, that it can feel very foreign, or even disrespectful, to be asked to do anything other than treat the author as an expert and reformulate what he or she said in different words.  If this “move” feels tricky to you, I really can’t recommend the primer on academic writing They Say/I Say enough, as I think the authors, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, do a wonderful job of framing the act of writing an academic essay as entering a conversation.  As such, you need to know what the people who have been participating in this conversation (i.e., the authors whose sources you’re writing about) have said before you arrived on the scene; but, just as you wouldn’t participate in a conversation by recapping what the others have said and stopping there, you shouldn’t write an expository essay by simply recapping what the authors have said and stopping there, as if your job is done.  As Graff and Birkenstein cover really well in their book, your job is to intelligently recap the authors’ arguments, thus providing context for your readers, and then respond to their arguments.

Graff and Birkenstein have a pretty straightforward formula for doing this and, in my experience, students chafe against its simplicity, arguing that the moves they lay out are too basic to represent the intellectual depths of their arguments.  BUT, as someone who has taught writing for a number of years, I see the benefit of such simplicity.  Namely: clarity.  If you use one of the response-move templates that Graff and Birkenstein lay out when writing about thesis, your argument will be abundantly clear.  In my experience, sometimes students opt for wording that sounds dressed up and intellectual but, if poked and prodded, or subjected to any level of analysis, their argument collapses like a house of cards. 

Graff and Birkenstein’s templates may SOUND basic, but they lead to having a very clear statement of what your argument actually is.  It’s hard to hide the fact that you may not have an argument when you’re forced to use language that is really clear and direct.

So, when you’re asked to write a thesis for an academic paper, remember that you’re responding to the sources you’re being asked to write about, not restating their argument.  You’re a commentator, giving your ‘take’ on these sources, not a translator, putting the authors’ words in your own style.

What’s your take on that?

Photo by Annie Spratt via Unsplash