Week 4
Homework (done at your own pace)
(1) Start Alice in Wonderland.
(2) Read the middle section (“History of Hell”) in Partially Excited States.
(3) From “files” area on Canvas, look again at these handouts:
What is a Thesis?
What is Audience?
What is a Paragraph?
Discussion 4 topic
In reading Alice in Wonderland and Partially Excited States, you have probably started to notice words new
to you. Keep track of those and look them up, then share with us half a dozen new words you learned
from doing the assigned reading.
D4 is due no later than 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, 13 September 2017
What Is a Thesis?
All graded essays in this course must have a thesis: a main point that you present and defend. It
needs to be something debatable—something you can prove and that is worth thinking about.
This is not the same as a thesis statement, which is a sentence (sometimes two) that compresses
your thesis into an explicit statement, often placed at the end of your introductory paragraph. Many
essays have a thesis statement; many do not. Reasons to hold back include having something so
startling or objectionable that you could lose your readers before you even start; in that case, it
makes sense to bury the thesis sentence in the middle of the paper or even to skip it entirely.
You need a thesis; you may or may not need a thesis statement.
What is not a thesis? Here are examples:
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Child abuse is wrong.
On average, men earn more than women.
Race is a problem in America today.
Reintroducing wolves to California will be controversial.
None of these could be reasonably debated; all are statements of fact. They cannot be a thesis.
Meanwhile, even a claim that can be debated may just be a weak thesis. The grading rubric expects
writers to defend interesting, challenging, insightful ideas. Merely proving the obvious is not enough.
What is a weak thesis? Here are examples of very dull, obvious claims:
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Football is the most American of all the sports.
When we travel to Mars, the biggest challenge is not radiation exposure, but psychology.
The “war on drugs” failed because we did not address the issues of supply and demand.
The American Civil War was less about slavery than about industrialization vs. farming.
How can you write a better thesis, one that could help get you an “A”? To do good work means you
take the audience someplace new: you help us see the problem a new way.
Let us say you are writing a paper about the most important American invention of the past 100
years. You look around your desk and think, “Oh I know, I will write about my new iPhone.”
That would be at best a “C-” thesis. Why? Out of a class of 30 students, probably 15 are writing
about their smart phones, so that makes it expected and hence average, and by definition, average
work gets a letter grade of C. But a bigger problem is that it assumes that smart phones are good.
Just because something is popular, that does not make it good.
Cigarettes used to be popular (even doctors smoked); that does not make cigarettes good.
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Problems with cell phones include their cost—one is locked into payment plans for years and years,
then you need to buy a case, insurance, increased data allotments—plus we need to think about the
number of car accidents caused while texting, the rise in cyber-bullying, lessened attention spans, or
a culture where nobody can calculate a restaurant tip without their phone’s help. The iPhone makes
social media postings easy (perhaps too easy), increasing America’s nauseating trend of empty
content and rampant narcissism. A smart phone is not inherently good or important.
So let’s say you take it a step further.
Rather than look at the iPhone as fun to use, maybe step back and look at what makes it American.
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It was designed by an expat Brit, Jony Ive. (What is “American” about that? We are a nation
of immigrants; that a foreign-born person is our best designer is delicious irony.)
Apple is very profitable because it uses exploited labor and tax evasion. (By off-shoring
manufacturing, Apple dodges taxes and increases profits: again, very American practices.
Most of our “American” companies do it.)
The iPhone makes shopping easy; sure, you can use it for bird-watching or to report a car
accident, but most people use smart phones to post to social media, do online shopping,
find out movie times (which is more shopping, in essence). Capitalism is based not on social
justice or outdoor activities, but on going to the mall. These phones facilitate that addiction.
But what if your American inventions paper looked at things differently, not in terms of an object
(the cotton gin or the tommy gun) but looked at ideas? For example, Jazz music and the western (as
a movie genre), those are two very American contributions to world culture. Henry Ford invented
the modern assembly line—not just factories, but an idea about factories. Blues gave us rock and roll.
Again, those are rather obvious choices. You can prove any of them but there’s no reasonable
opposition. You set a low bar with those choices: they are too easy. They are not going to bring your
paper to an A, not even if you prove that the first Star Wars was basically a western set in space, or
that the World War II drama Casablanca is more a western than it is an example of film noir.
What’s the best American invention? What about this thesis:
Drywall. That’s the most important American product of the past 100 years.
Cheap to make, easy to ship, filled with the most basic of ingredients (gypsum), these standardized
plasterboard sheets make possible almost every modern building, from houses to hotels to hospitals.
Yet they also create a living-wage occupation (a top-end drywaller makes more than a teacher) and
they even added a new word to the English language (“sheetrock”). If you wanted to ask which
would make daily life worse, not having an iPhone or not having drywall, the answer is drywall.
Only problem with that as a thesis? Drywall was invented in England, not America, and it’s more
than 100 years old.
But that at least allows you to break into new territory, so you can think about objects like latex
condoms (1920s until today), the pencil (Shakespeare never had one), leaf blowers, where hip hop
came from, or In-n-Out Burger, or the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Your job? Make us smarter.
What is a Paragraph?
College essays need sustained paragraphs, and odds are, you’re probably not doing enough in yours.
Here is the template for an ideal paragraph (with notes on exceptions to follow below). You need to
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provide a transition from whatever you were doing previously
introduce a main point or topic
let us know what you’ll be doing overall
begin to support your paragraph’s main point
introduce each quotation as you use it
cite support with in-text, MLA-style documentation
provide more than one piece of evidence
allow counter views to challenge your evidence
refute the counter views
bring the paragraph to a logical close and make a transition to the next idea
All of this takes ten or fifteen sentences; just two or three won’t be enough. Look at your finished,
hard-copy essay: if there are four or more paragraphs per page, you’re probably not developing and
supporting your work very thoroughly. On a regular page, there won’t be room for four paragraphs.
Exceptions?
Sometimes you want something shorter in order to provide a pivot between one idea and the next;
you can have something as brief as a one-word paragraph if it’s the right thing to do. (You might
end a long paragraph with the rhetorical question, “And of these choices, which is the correct
answer?” And then do a paragraph break, and answer that with a stand-alone sentence that says,
“None of them.” And then we go to the next paragraph and in that one, there you show how all the
received knowledge about why the war on drugs misperceives the problem and that the actual way
to see it is blah blah.) Don’t let your work sound formulaic or mechanical: humans crave variety.
a note on format
Paragraphs flow continuously, using the same double-spacing as the main text. Do not insert
additional space between them. You may need to go into the paragraph dialog box of Word and
check the option, “Do not insert extra space.” (If you can, default it so it’s checked permanently.)
Paragraphs should always start with an indent: tab over half an inch from the regular margin.
If in doubt, check the models Hood has provided.
What is Audience?
“Audience” asks, Who do you imagine you’re talking to inside your paper? Many students do poorly because
they write papers aimed at an audience of simpletons. That was fine in high school, but not here.
Please write for smart, busy people—and please assume the best about us, not the worst.
One way to learn audience is to watch TED talks on YouTube. See for example the list of the 25
most popular TED talks of all time:
https://www.ted.com/playlists/171/the_most_popular_talks_of_all
Another way to learn audience is to look at these smart magazines, available at Barnes & Noble:
The New Yorker
The Nation
Vanity Fair
Rolling Stone
Harper’s
Time
Examples of poor choices of audience:
xx Starting a sentence with “In my opinion....”
Why it’s wrong:
(a) Of course it’s your opinion; your name is on the paper, isn’t it?
(b) Nobody gives a fig about your opinion. An opinion is not a thesis.
(c) As a rhetorical marker, it signals a refusal to take responsibility. It tries to
say, “Oh, don’t get mad at me, it’s just my opinion.” You must own, defend,
prove any of your claims and assertions. Asking us not to be critical of your
stance is not fair: either you have evidence or you don’t.
xx Starting with a definition. “What is democracy? According to dictionary.com, it is....”
Why it’s wrong:
(a) Any adult can reasonably be expected to know this word. If you stop the
show to define it, you are implying we don’t know it already. That’s insulting.
(b) Even if we didn’t know it, going to the most obvious, child-like source
insults us. At least go to a more subtle, insightful, or creative source than
something we all own or can access from our phones in, like, two seconds.
Between his house and his campus office, Hood owns ten dictionaries. He
doesn’t need you to define basic things for him.
(c) You’re wasting our time by retracing steps you may have needed to go
through in getting ready to start the paper. Your own process and research is
not our problem: after you have a good definition worked up (by contrasting
and collating ten sources), then start the paper. Just because you may have
needed to look it up doesn’t mean that we need to watch you look it up. Look
it up on your own time, and come back to us when you’re ready to start.
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How to fix this would be to take it to a higher level. This is correct:
Although most Americans have a fairly agreed-upon sense of the word
“democracy,” the Founding Fathers in framing the constitution worked from
a radically different set of assumptions. According to Professor Krud, when
Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams talked about “democracy,” they
meant something more like “sit down and shut up, because father knows
best” (45). Why this matters is that . . .
Lying to the audience is also a problem. Hood received this statement in a paper once.
xx Ever been to the mall? It’s a great place to go shopping.
Why it’s wrong:
(a) Of course the reader has been to the mall. We’re not space aliens. What a
massively insulting thing to ask. Hood did not grow up on Neptune.
(b) This sentence lies. The Antelope Valley Mall is a NOT a good place to
go shopping. Do you think people from Santa Monica going to Third Street
Promenade or hipsters going to vintage clothing stores on Melrose are
wringing their hands in anguish, bereft because they have to shop in L.A.
and can’t afford the gas to come to Palmdale and shop at the AV Mall?
Certainly not. A good place to go shopping is London or Paris or New York.
Write for grown-ups who inhabit the real world. Don’t write nonsense.
(c) Who even cares about shopping?
¶ how to learn a better sense of audience ¶
As writing models, USA Today and the Antelope Valley Press aim too low, and Wikipedia is just a long
report. (Nobody reads Wikipedia for fun.) Instead, to learn voice, do a search for “the most popular
TED talks of all time.” These informal lectures model the voice to use when talking to us.
Yet another way to learn audience is to go to a museum and take a docent tour. Go to the Getty and
take the architecture tour or go to LACMA (L.A. County Museum of Art) and look at a painting on
one of their free tours. Go to the Petersen Museum and take a tour of the fancy cars (including the
DeLorean from Back to the Future.) How the docent explains things to the human beings there in the
room—with a voice that is polite, friendly, engaging, yet very informative—that is how you should
write to us, your fellow humans and your expectant readers.
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