Transcription
Welcome back, everyone. It's getting a little warm in here. Let's talk about thesis statements, the most important part of your essay. I don't know how much instruction you've had on thesis construction at this point but I'm going to be pretty clear, I think, with what I want.
A thesis should have at least two if not three parts and it needs to satisfy a certain set of criteria. The most important part of your thesis is a clear claim. You need to be claiming something. You need be arguing something that, and we've already discussed how you have to be careful about the amount of stakes, the level of stakes involved in that claim. It should be arguable.
But you also need to include clearly in your thesis statement what we call a rationale. A rationale is a sort of unified expression of why you're claiming this. So, in high school, your rationale was just those three points. But here I want a more logical, unified rationale, something that I might call an umbrella phrase or statement that really expresses everything that you are going to be using to prove your argument, all the sub points that you're going to use. You're not going to list the sub points. Instead you're going to find a way to express how those sub points logically go together to provide reasoning behind what you're saying all right and that needs to be explicitly expressed in your thesis statement.
One of the main traps I've noticed with students' papers is they make a nice claim and they leave off the rationale. Just a note: the rationale will probably be the hardest part of the entire essay to write. It is not easy to come up with a way to express in a succinct way everything that you're trying to say, you know, to support your claim. So you need to a claim, rationale. Those are non-negotiable in the thesis statement and I'm going to include a file with just a random thesis that I generated for the Tom Ford ad and you can see some of the way that I've developed supporting paragraphs for that, okay.
A third part of your thesis, which is optional, is qualifications. You don't, you're not required to argue that your position holds under all circumstances. It may not, right. If you, you can circumscribe what you will and will not argue from the outset. "Although, you know, in these circumstances, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah" or "Although I recognize that these are things that would invalidate what I'm about to say, blah, blah, blah, in this case, duh duh duh, or under these circumstances, this thing I'm claiming holds true because..." That's a good way to make sure that you have your rationale in place.
Obviously you want to polish up the way that you are expressing yourself, but while you're working on a working thesis it doesn't hurt to have, to think to yourself, okay, "Is there anything under the although part? Do I have althoughs?" If not, that's fine, because that's optional and the other part is the "because" part. So you want to be thinking of "such and such as true, because such and such." That's logically the way that your thesis should be constructed no matter how you are eventually going to express it, okay. That's the underlying logic of it. There's a "because" there.
Also, your thesis needs to be of dramatic interest. It should seem significant. Throughout your entire essay, I'm going to be asking, "So what? So what? "So what?" Right? And that's the first place where I'm really is going to start with my "so what"s. Should be abundantly obvious "so what?" You need to articulate your thesis in a way that captures my interest and makes me invested in what you're about to argue all right.
Also obviously my attention is very, very high when I hit your thesis statement so this needs to be a place where you're really taking care with your language and making sure that you're expressing yourself as well as possible. Thesis statements generally take lots of drafts, so get ready for that. I'm dividing this video into, the next one is going to be a list of pitfalls that I have noticed over the years in student thesis statements and we'll go for them together, so you don't make those mistakes, okay.