The Evolving Thesis

The evolving thesis is something that I had never heard of before this class. I mean, I just thought a thesis was a thesis and that it did not change. Throughout my whole writing career I have been taught that you finish the opening paragraph with a thesis and then you start the closing paragraph with a restated thesis. Nobody ever said anything about it evolving until I got to this course.

There is a whole chapter in the textbook Writing Analytically that is devoted to the evolving thesis, so I think it is pretty important. One section of the chapter gives you six steps to making a thesis evolve.

Step 1: Formulate an idea about your subject, a working thesis.

I think I have that one down, as that is what I have been doing since middle school.

Step 2: See how far you can make this thesis go in accounting for confirming evidence.

Okay so I find as much evidence as possible that supports my thesis. Got it.

Step 3: Locate the evidence that is not adequately accounted for by the thesis.

Look for complicating evidence. I can do that.

Step 4: Make explicit the apparent mismatch between the thesis and selected evidence, asking and answering, "so what?"

This is where it gets different. I have been told in the past that you can use complicating evidence to acknowledge the other side of argument or to potentially further your analysis, but making it explicit in an essay and answering the "so what?" question is something that I have never done before. Now looking back on it, it is definitely an essential step, and answering the "so what?" question is extremely important.

Step 5: Reshape your claim to accommodate evidence that hasn't fit.

Wow. I had honestly never heard that one before. Change your thesis in the middle of an essay? What kind of writing is that? Well it turns out that it is more advanced writing, and is something that will make an essay much more sophisticated.

Step 6: Repeat steps 2, 3, 4, and 5 several times.

Pretty self explanatory.

The evolving thesis is something that has made my writing ten times better than it was before. It is an essential part of essay writing and I think should be taught a little earlier than college. It just makes an essay so much better. It makes the writer really think about their claim and defend it, and then encourages deeper thinking to restructure the claim in order to accommodate new evidence. You can't just throw away complicating evidence anymore, but you embrace it and use it to complicate your essay and make it more complex. The evolving thesis is essential for complex college level writing, and I am glad that I learned it now.

During the semester, I did use the idea of the evolving thesis in two of my essays, the Analysis essay and the Argument essay.

The Analysis Essay:

Original Thesis:

Evolved Thesis:

For this essay I looked at the idea of the deserving versus undeserving poor. As you can see, my original thesis was just that the poor are put into these categories of deserving and undeserving. Throughout the essay however, it evolved into "The poor have always been misrepresented through media, those who are classified as undeserving poor are affected the most." I took the idea of just placing the poor into these categories of deserving and undeserving and put a twist on it as I worked through my essay and found complicating evidence that would further my thinking and my writing. This was a seven page paper, and, as Mr. Lester told us, your thesis really should be evolving over he course of seven pages.

The Argument Essay:

Original Thesis:

Evolved Thesis:

This essay was about the Israel-Palestine conflict. My original thesis only stated that the two groups I was looking into, The American Studies Association and Israeli Apartheid Week, were attempting to solve the unsolvable, which was the Israel-Palestine conflict, through boycotts, divestments and sanctions. Over the course of my essay, which was a research paper, I found a lot of evidence that supported my thesis, and a lot of evidence that helped me to reshape it. My evolved thesis stated that the two organizations I mentioned above were participating in cultural resistance, but instead of advancing their side of the issue, they were actually hurting people. This is very different from my original thesis and it shows how my thinking and writing evolved over the course of the essay.

The evolving thesis is something that is essential to essay writing. It furthers you as a thinker and a writer, and makes your essay much more complex. It has helped me tremendously throughout the course, and my writing would not be what it is right now without having learned about the evolving thesis.

RSA Animate

The Jumpstart unit on education that we did was my favorite unit of the whole year. I think this was because it was the unit that I had the most interest in. We learned about how education is different around the world and how it is different depending on socioeconomic status and location and a multitude of different things. We looked at the difference between working class schools and affluent schools and inner city schools versus suburban schools. We also looked at the system of education as a whole through the RSA Animate Changing Paradigms that we watched in class. This was one of my favorite things that we did all year, and is something that will stick with me for a long time.

I had never seen anything like the RSA Animate that we watched. I really liked the way that they did it with the visual graphics accompanying the speech made by Sir Ken Robinson. The graphics made the speech interesting to watch and were a cool visual to go along with it. I watched it numerous times after we watched it in class because I liked it so much and because I used it as a supporting source in my Jumpstart essay.

I am very interested in education, and the RSA Animate opened my eyes to a different way of looking at education that made a big impact on me and was something that I agree with. It showed that many of the things that we are doing in the education system today are not the best things for students and are not allowing them to succeed and reach their full potential. It brought up some fantastic points about how to change this and made some very valid arguments as to why we should. It was something that me think.

The RSA Animate affected me as a thinker the most. After watching the video, I thought about education and my role in education much more than I had previously. I thought about how all of our standardized tests, like the Common Core, have a negative impact on children learning. As education, specifically foreign language education, is a field that I may want to go in to, this gave me a lot to think about and contemplate for the future.

Recently, I was talking to my Macroeconomics teacher and another student in our class about the role of education, and I was able to participate fully in the discussion that we were having because of all of the things that we learned during the Jumpstart unit and my interest in the topic. The RSA Animate helped me to learn about these topics in education and further my thinking by creating my own opinions about the topic of education, and also taught me how to see things from a different perspective.

Revision

Revision is something that is necessary for all writing. My eighth grade English teacher used to say, "Writing is not done, it's due". Even though I may not have revised every essay I have done, I definitely did for this class. Here is a paragraph that I worked on revising during my Analysis unit essay on Slumdog Millionaire.

The First Draft:

This is the first draft of my paragraph for the Analysis essay. The first and second sentences were fine, in my opinion, so I left them in there. The third sentence was where I decided to make some changes. Instead of just jumping in to the fact that Jamal's story is told through a series of flashbacks, I decided to give a little more background information about why he was even in interrogation in the first place. To do this I used a quote from the police inspector to tell the reader why Jamal was there, which can be seen in the next draft. I did not cut the sentence that begins with "His story..." out of the essay, but instead moved it to a different part of the paragraph, which can also be seen in the next draft. Finally, I decided to cut the last two sentences from the paragraph because I felt that they were unnecessary to the essay's development. My peer reviewer clued me in to this, but in the end it was my decision to take out both sentences and rework the paragraph.

The Second Draft:

Here is the second draft of my paragraph for this essay. As you can see, I added a couple of sentences after the sentence that ends with, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" These two sentences provided much more important background information to my essay than the two sentences that were in my other draft, where I was talking about what book the movie was based on and what influenced it. These two sentences told the reader why Jamal was being interrogated and allowed the essay to move on very quickly.

The problem with the essay now was that I had never introduced an important outside source that the ideas of my essay were based on, which was Diana George. Fortunately, this was the perfect place to put a new paragraph that outlined those ideas, which shows up in my final essay.

The Final Draft:

This is the final draft of my essay. The addition of the paragraph about Diana George's ides really helped my essay get off the ground. It provided the groundwork for the rest of my essay and helped me to evolve my thesis and and analyze the idea of the deserving poor and undeserving poor, which was the main point in my essay.

The paragraph was intended to be an introductory type of paragraph. It was not intended to help me to prove my point in the essay, but to show where my ideas were coming from and where they originated. I used a quote from her essay in the paragraph as supporting evidence of her belief in this idea, and then had a couple sentences around the quote just reinforcing the idea that the poor are classified into the categories of deserving and undeserving. Then I transitioned into the next paragraph and continued with my essay.

Revision is something that is essential to all essay writing. A revised essay will be better than an essay that has not been revised nearly all of the time. I know that this essay would most definitely not be what it is without the revision that took place throughout the three drafts it took to get it to where it is right now.

Dialogic Journal

This year I did a lot of annotating and active reading. I love to read, but I have never really liked to active read. I do not like to annotate and post-it note and do all of those things that active reading normally incorporates. However, this year I was introduced to the dialogic journal, which has now become my preferred way to active read. It allows me to read the whole source without having to stop all the time and make notes about what I think or how I feel. All I have to do is highlight what quotes I think I want to use and then I can go back after finishing the reading and really dissect them and let my thoughts flow. The dialogic journal helped me in that way by allowing me more room to talk about my thoughts on the quote and reading in general. With annotations, there is very little space to write in the margins and I believe it does not provide for deep and profound thinking about what is being read. With that being said, I also think that dialogic journals have a setback in the fact that they only allow for the reader to really dissect the four or five quotes that they picked out from the reading.


Dialogic Journal on John Taylor Gatto's Against School:

This dialogic journal entry shows how I have had active engagement with the text. It shows that I have picked out a quote from the reading, analyzed it, and provided my own opinions about the quote and about the author's views. For this particular quote, I thought that John Taylor Gatto had turned into a little bit of a conspiracy theorist, even though I did, as Mr. Lester said, realize that I agree with his thoughts a little in the next line of my synthesis. The quote led me to think about how education is in New York State right now and how through Common Core maybe this idea of conformity and complex management is being put into effect. Through Common Core, there is part of a curriculum that a teacher teaches that they must teach and that all teachers must teach the same, which seems to be evidence of conformity. Without the dialogic journal, all of the ideas that I had about this essay would never have come to light. They probably would have all been bouncing around in my head, but I would never have worked through them and come up with more complex ideas without the dialogic journal. Through active reading, my ideas were able to grow, become more profound, and I was able to achieve a higher level of thinking than I would have without active reading and the dialogic journal.

Peer Review

Peer review helped me a lot during this semester. Honestly, some of my work was a complete mess before it was peer reviewed. There are some paragraphs where my peer reviewer, most of the time Arth, wrote all over it and there are so many pencil marks and scribbles that it is nearly unrecognizable as the original paragraph that it was.

During the Analysis essay, I wrote about the movie Slumdog Millionaire. In one of the paragraphs in my essay, I talked about the setting of the movie, and it was an absolute disaster before it was peer reviewed.

BEFORE:

Wow look at that mess.

AFTER:

Isn't it beautiful?

One thing that needed to be fixed with this paragraph was repetition. I know that when I write I tend to repeat myself, even though I don't realize it. It is something that when I proofread myself that I must be aware of, and even then sometimes I don't catch the repetition. 

For example, in this paragraph the first and last sentences are almost exactly the same. That is really unnecessary, since I think the reader probably gets the point after I state it in the first sentence, but I repeated the exact same thing at the end of the paragraph. Luckily, Arth read it and pointed it out to me, as you can see by all the scribbles and notes, and in my final essay, that sentence is totally gone.

The bigger issue with this paragraph was the general disorganization. As you can see in the paragraphs above, there was a lot of editing of this paragraph, and the end result looks almost nothing like the original, except for the first sentence. Peer review helped me to organize my thoughts because I did not realize just how messy the paragraph was because it was my invention and I knew exactly what I wanted it to say. Peer review allowed to get a second perspective on my writing that was filled with helpful comments like, "reword this" and "move this here" and scribbling out some words. In the end, even some of the sentences that were supposed to be reworded wer cut and new, better sentences were created and put into the essay that helped with the organization and clarity of the paragraph.

 

I had never realized the importance of peer review before this semester. The second perspective that I received during peer review greatly enhanced my writing by making by making sure that my essay flowed, made sense, was meeting the guidelines and had no elementary grammatical errors. Without peer review, all of my essays this year would definitely not be up to the same standard that they were.