Transcription
Welcome back. Okay, this is part two of our lecture on thesis statements, particularly things that you can do wrong with your thesis statement. I've sort of been brainstorming a list of things I've seen and I want to share them with you now.
So number one is the one that we've been talking about. Whoops a daisy. Shopping lists. Do not give me a list of points in your thesis statement. Yeah, you're going to have multiple points that you're going over in the body of your paper, but you don't want that, you don't want a list of points in your thesis. You want a unified rationale instead. You want your thesis to look like one, like unified. I want to see the connections between things.
The second one is also what we've been going on about: Painfully obvious. Your argument, and obviously your thesis statement is the articulation of your argument, should not be painfully obvious. I'll give you some examples of this that I wrote down: "Great Expectations, written by Charles Dickens, is widely read." I literally get thesis statements like that. "Because Dickens lived over a hundred years ago, it's hard to imagine his world." Whaaaat? Like, where do you go from there? I don't even, that, that's a useless thesis statement.
Okay, remember when I was talking about style and one of the things I said was "Don't be vague." Well don't be vague in your thinking either. This comes out in thesis statements in a couple of different ways. One is like what I said: just those sort of vague expressions like "many problems." All right, that was a good example of a vague expression, but there are more specific ways to be vague.
There can be, you can have huge historical sweeps. Oh, boy, you guys love to do that, even after my semiotics lecture. Okay, if I do nothing, I want to show you guys, to teach you to be more specific about time and place and to know that these, you know, whatever you experience, it's not necessarily what somebody else has experienced. At this level, you've got professional historians for one thing and other people who are trained in historiography. These people look at history in terms of a matter of years or moments, right. You're never going to want to say something like "from the beginning of time" or, you know, "since the earliest days of man" or any kind of, like, unless you're in a geology course, that is too big a sweep. Nothing you could say about humanity that was going on in, you know, 2,000 BC is going a hold true today and be an argument worth making. Yes, I know there are things they're still saying but they're not arguments worth making. So you've got to be much more precise in terms of the time periods that you want to look at if you're doing analysis that involves time.
Now, for our first essay, the big trap with that is to start talking to me about the history of advertising. That is a huge historical sweep. It does not, it's not really relevant to what you're doing and it's just a waste of my time reading it, so. And it just shows me that you're imprecise in your thinking and I hate that. So avoid a huge historical sweep, okay. Do not make vast judgments about the way things are and always have been, okay. It's just, it's not, it doesn't show the kind of sophistication we want at college level.
By the same token, you're not gonna go with a huge population sweep. "All over the world, blah, blah, blah..." No, not all over the world. Remember my semiotics lecture: almost nothing is all over the world, okay. Things vary considerably all over the world, so don't assume that you know what it feels like to live in Indonesia unless you're from Indonesia, okay. That is insulting to the people who live in other places when you assume that their experience is exactly like yours. A lot of imprecise and very naive thinking arises out of, out of making huge population sweeps like that in your thinking, okay. It's embarrassing. Don't do it.
Another one is hyperbole. Avoid hyperbole in your thesis statement. What's hyperbole? Deliberate overstatement. Do not talk about like things being a scourge or, you know, a crisis or like an epidemic, unless it is an epidemic. You know there's a definition for that. But like be careful with that over-the-top language, okay. You want it to adopt a scholarly tone, a measured tone, a logical tone. Not a like "I'm losing my mind" tone, you know, that people get when they talk about politics or whatever. There's place for that obviously, but that kind of hysteria is not appropriate in the academic discourse community. We try to talk about things in a more measured way, all right. So be careful of hyperbole in your thesis statement.
Be careful of the "scary present-day." A lot of people like to act like we're going through the apocalypse now, okay. They talk about this being the worst of all times, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's not, factually not, true. None of that's true. We live longer, healthier, happier lives for the most part, most of us, than anybody ever has in history. See? I just did the huge historical sweep. But in this case it's true. You know, violence has been reduced significantly from previous eras. Disease has been reduced. Equal rights have gone up. There's all kinds of things have been improved in the present day, so you make yourself look naive again if you start going on about how scary things are right now. It's sort of like a subcategory of hyperbole, right? Don't be paranoid in your analysis.
Wishy-washy words in general: words and phrases like "good," "bad," "nice," "important," "interesting." Things like that. You don't want to, you want to look for the more specific words, precise words, remember. That's my value with your vocabulary: how precise is that word choice? Things like "good" are not very precise, right.
You want to avoid weasel words and phrases. Well, what are those? They are words that suck all the stakes out of your argument. They are ways, they're hedging words and phrases. They're ways to sort of back off what you're actually trying to argue like "kind of," "sort of," "in a way," "practically," "pretty much." Also words, some of the words I'm guilty of using in these videos, like "stuff" and "things," "factors," you know.
One subcategory of the weasel words is false humility. For some reason that bumped over. Let's try again. Well, it's not going to, it's going to bump it over, whatever. False humility. I realize that you are student writing about subjects on which you are not an expert. I get that. We will address your lack of expertise later, but you're not getting out of it by saying things like, "Well, in my opinion" or "what seems to me" or "at least to me" or like again that is a trick to suck the stakes, the risk, out of your argument because you're sort of inoculating yourself against me arguing against you, because I'm like, "Oh, well, it's just, you know, just his or her idea about this," you know. You don't want to do that. You want to be powerful in your arguments. It's your house. That essay is your house and you're the boss, okay. You tell me how it is. You don't hedge on that and go, "Well, I don't know. I think this." No, you tell me how it is, okay? Be firm. Be firm with your reader. Be confident. Do not use false humility even though you may feel insecure about, what you're writing about, okay. Those are really bad ideas for you, okay.
Do not cite ghost-like authorities. This is what Fox News loves to do, oh my god. "Experts contend," "people agree," "scientists agree," "authorities believe." Okay, you can cite authorities and I will talk to you about the value of doing that. You can cite authorities in your essay. That's no problem. But you actually have to cite them. I want names. I want links to their work. I want proof that this authority said this. You need to point a finger at an authority, a real authority, if you want to use them to back you up. You can't just say, "People think this" or "experts think that," right? That's, you can't get away with that. Fox loves to do that. It passes by the average viewer. It does not pass by me, because I'm trained in critical thinking. Watch it!
The last one is it going to be a catch-all of like five paragraph essay-isms. Let's just call them that. I made a list: "Webster's dictionary defines..." Do not start your essay -- we'll talk about openers -- do not start it with a dictionary definition, okay. Oh my god, don't do that. "First," "second," "third." Don't use those words to introduce your paragraphs. There are some other ones. Oh! "In conclusion." Using the phrase "in conclusion" in your conclusion. If I don't know that your conclusion is your conclusion from the way that it's expressed you haven't done a very good job of it, and adding "in conclusion" is sort of hanging a bit of too much of a lampshade on it. It's clunky. It reeks of high school. Don't do it.
Avoid the constructions "there is" and "there are." We do it, we all do that sometimes, but try to avoid it. I'll talk to you a bit more about sentence focus when we get to style and grammar. But just know right now that if you hit a sentence where you've said, "there is," "there are," try to figure out a different way to express it that removes those phrases, okay.
I think that's everything for now that I can think of. Obviously, if I if I come up with any other pitfalls I can think of, I will let you know but good luck in creating your thesis statements.