Tuesday 14 April 2009

How to Defend a Thesis or Dissertation?

How to Defend a Thesis or Dissertation?:

Pointers to Defending a Thesis or Dissertation

A thesis defense! Everybody seems diffident of taking an oral examination. But how can you not be intimidated? After all, you are defending a topic in front of experts! In this situation, fear is more of a natural response than exception.

It turns out that the outcome of your thesis defense is largely dependent on how you manage your fears! Believe it or not, no matter the amount of stuff you know and your arduous rehash, you are bound to fail if you are not psychologically conditioned to face your challenge. Hence, focus on this aspect and put in mind its relative significance to your preparations: Actual preparations (30%) and execution (70%). At the onset, there might be a need to defend this percentage allocation.

Recall what a custom written thesis or dissertation means. It is usual for institutions to refer to the word thesis as some kind of an involved research work, usually done by an undergraduate student or a graduate pursuing a masteral degree. Certainly, a masteral thesis is relatively more comprehensive in scope and normally defended in front of an examining panel or a committee. A custom dissertation is a research paper or a thesis usually done by a candidate to a doctoral degree. However, it has become customary for many institutions to refer to a dissertation as a doctoral thesis. At any rate, a baccalaureate, masteral, or especially the doctoral thesis is a serious piece of original research work that requires considerable time to complete under the guidance of an advisor, usually a professor or expert in the field that the student is working on. Therefore, mastery of the thesis or its subject content is one that cannot be expected of a student simply in a matter of weeks; in fact, mastery is developed from the time of thesis conception to reproduction! This is just to say that understanding the subject matter during the relatively short time allotted to the preparation for a defense is too late a preparation- and, certainly, this is not leading to any mastery of subject matter. Currently, this is not what is meant also by preparations.

Accordingly, preparations for a thesis defense rest on one crucial assumption or requirement: Mastery of the topic and those matters relevant to it. Precisely, you must have built some considerable confidence on your knowledge about your subject matter through the years that you were working on it. Otherwise, there is no point scheduling for a defense- simply, you are not ready!

Suppose that you do have the required knowledge and confidence about it. Here are down-to-earth pointers that may help you through a successful defense, stated in suggested order of execution:

1. The Planning

Call it a "game plan," but there is nothing more assuring at the back of your mind than a well laid out plan. Begin by setting aside a comfortable amount of time for your preparation, say, a month or so. Make sure that the rest of the tasks that you must do must fit in this allotted time, plus some allowances. Yes, assume contingencies in your plan and strategize how to manage them. For instance, remember that you will need help from other people (classmates, colleagues, professors, etc.); hence, give leeway for their busy schedules.

2. Visitations

Visiting classmates, colleagues and members of your committee must be first in your plan. Ask about the business of defending a thesis. Some students are so organized and conscientious that they logged questions and responses of old examinations for the succeeding examinees to use. Take a preview, and try to comprehend the underlying scope and limitations. Further, it is likely that you will get a characteristic profile of your examining committee from older students. Use all these information to probe further: Visit your committee members. Thoughtful visitations, at the least, will help impress them of your seriousness. Most of the time, a good professor will not resist a curious, dedicated and thoughtful learner.

3. Refine Your Plan

Nobody says that you cannot go back to the drawing board and make changes to your plan. In fact, you must do this as often as necessary. Were the advices by other students inaccurate? What imminent changes are possible? The end result must be a strategy for a defense that is most comfortable for you. Besides, you can only feel comfortable once you know you have already a fair handle of the situation.

4. Defense Materials

It is quite alright to bring important visual aids or extracts from your thesis (charts, drawings, quotations, tables, etc.) to help you elaborate on your responses to questions. It is not necessary to carry a heavy baggage inside the examination room, but it is certainly assuring to have with you "everything" that you might think will be helpful. Remember, as always, "pictures speak louder than words," and, when short of articulation, one visual aid may be ready for the rescue. Really, you may not have to say, "As you know" if I have only brought with me that particular diagram, you might know exactly what I mean." Do not underestimate the value of simple tools like colored pens. You might actually be asked to demonstrate certain details on a blank transparency, to support your arguments. Likewise, you may not have to say, "Is there a pen somewhere? I wish I can write it all out for you." Certainly, a lack of simple tools during your defense can be misinterpreted as some lack of seriousness or mastery on your part.

5. Practice

The old adage "Practice makes perfect" still holds. Gather some friends and classmates to do the “mock orals” for you. Allow any of them to depict the questioning style of your committee members, and do the practice as realistically as possible. Your final hints to your potential performance can be gauge from here. When permissible, request for two or three sessions and consider the suggestions and key improvements each time. To a large extent, your own group can best decide on whether or not you will eventually succeed.

From this point onward, you are on your own. After all, the decision to succeed or not still is your own. Now, it is the right time to work out on you psychological conditioning. The following pointers may serve as your inspiration to manage any remaining fear and ensure a smooth defense:

A. Do you have any reason to expect what can possibly go wrong? You had years of studying your subject. You have addressed many issues and queries along the way. And, you know you are still in command of your thesis. What then can be more assuring on your part?

B. Did you complete your preparations from planning to "mock orals"? Did you receive a final nod from your friends and classmates? Was your main advisor happy about this? If so, do you have further reasons to harbor any fear?

C. Remember what failure means. Your years of stay in school have been expensive. You will not like paying for the same real estate twice. You would rather like a job that earns you a better livelihood or push you to a higher degree or accomplishment. Simply, you cannot afford to be ruined by mere fear of one examination!

D. Finally, all humans fear- yes, your committee members included! At least you are a normal human being. Understand what is meant by failure- it is not the end of everything! Knowing this fall back position and your strong drive to succeed is your final defense against fear.

On your examination day, these are the remaining final preparations:

1. Do not overdress yourself. You are up to a rough ride; come on a presentable (formal) yet comfortable attire.

2. Try to act natural and well composed. Without being presumptuous, look ready to take up any question.

3. Understand each question well and/or clarify before making any response.

4. Don't ever bluff! You are in front of respectable and knowledgeable people. It is alright to say "I cannot have the explanation offhand," "I can't seem to remember a good explanation," or "I don't believe that I have an answer to that." Yes, honesty matters to your committee next to mastery.

In sum, your prime pointer to defending your custom-written PhD thesis or dissertation is largely on your defense against irrational fears. Strive to manage these fears through strong psychological conditioning backed by your ready mastery of your thesis and some systematic preparations. "No guts, no glory." Remember: If gamblers can exploit courage to win by pure luck, certainly, you can succeed because you have the tangible ingredients to success.

Contributed by Rex Balena, PhD.

Multidisciplinary Scientist and Educator Consultant: Data processing, basic and advanced statistical analyses, PowerPoint/multimedia presentations, and custom essay writing on science and education topics.

Thesis Statements

Thesis Statements:

How To Write a Thesis Statement

What is a Thesis Statement?

Almost all of us—even if we don’t do it consciously—look early in an essay for a one- or two-sentence condensation of the argument or analysis that is to follow. We refer to that condensation as a thesis statement.

Why Should Your Essay Contain a Thesis Statement?

to test your ideas by distilling them into a sentence or two
to better organize and develop your argument
to provide your reader with a “guide” to your argument

In general, your thesis statement will accomplish these goals if you think of the thesis as the answer to the question your paper explores.

How Can You Write a Good Thesis Statement?

Here are some helpful hints to get you started. You can either scroll down or select a link to a specific topic.

How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is Assigned.
How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is not Assigned.
How to Tell a Strong Thesis Statement from a Weak One.

How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is Assigned.

Almost all assignments, no matter how complicated, can be reduced to a single question. Your first step, then, is to distill the assignment into a specific question. For example, if your assignment is, “Write a report to the local school board explaining the potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class,” turn the request into a question like, “What are the potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class?” After you’ve chosen the question your essay will answer, compose one or two complete sentences answering that question.

Q: “What are the potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class?”

A: “The potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class are . . .”

A: “Using computers in a fourth-grade class promises to improve . . .”

The answer to the question is the thesis statement for the essay.

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How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is not Assigned.

Even if your assignment doesn’t ask a specific question, your thesis statement still needs to answer a question about the issue you’d like to explore. In this situation, your job is to figure out what question you’d like to write about.

A good thesis statement will usually include the following four attributes:

take on a subject upon which reasonable people could disagree
deal with a subject that can be adequately treated given the nature of the assignment
express one main idea
assert your conclusions about a subject

Let’s see how to generate a thesis statement for a social policy paper.

Brainstorm the topic.
Let’s say that your class focuses upon the problems posed by changes in the dietary habits of Americans. You find that you are interested in the amount of sugar Americans consume.

You start out with a thesis statement like this:

Sugar consumption.

This fragment isn’t a thesis statement. Instead, it simply indicates a general subject. Furthermore, your reader doesn’t know what you want to say about sugar consumption.

Narrow the topic.
Your readings about the topic, however, have led you to the conclusion that elementary school children are consuming far more sugar than is healthy.

You change your thesis to look like this:

Reducing sugar consumption by elementary school children.

This fragment not only announces your subject, but it focuses on one segment of the population: elementary school children. Furthermore, it raises a subject upon which reasonable people could disagree, because while most people might agree that children consume more sugar than they used to, not everyone would agree on what should be done or who should do it. You should note that this fragment is not a thesis statement because your reader doesn’t know your conclusions on the topic.

Take a position on the topic.
After reflecting on the topic a little while longer, you decide that what you really want to say about this topic is that something should be done to reduce the amount of sugar these children consume.

You revise your thesis statement to look like this:

More attention should be paid to the food and beverage choices available to elementary school children.

This statement asserts your position, but the terms more attention and food and beverage choices are vague.

Use specific language.
You decide to explain what you mean about food and beverage choices, so you write:

Experts estimate that half of elementary school children consume nine times the recommended daily allowance of sugar.

This statement is specific, but it isn’t a thesis. It merely reports a statistic instead of making an assertion.

Make an assertion based on clearly stated support.
You finally revise your thesis statement one more time to look like this:

Because half of all American elementary school children consume nine times the recommended daily allowance of sugar, schools should be required to replace the beverages in soda machines with healthy alternatives.

Notice how the thesis answers the question, “What should be done to reduce sugar consumption by children, and who should do it?” When you started thinking about the paper, you may not have had a specific question in mind, but as you became more involved in the topic, your ideas became more specific. Your thesis changed to reflect your new insights.

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How to Tell a Strong Thesis Statement from a Weak One.

1. A strong thesis statement takes some sort of stand.

Remember that your thesis needs to show your conclusions about a subject. For example, if you are writing a paper for a class on fitness, you might be asked to choose a popular weight-loss product to evaluate. Here are two thesis statements:

There are some negative and positive aspects to the Banana Herb Tea Supplement.

This is a weak thesis statement. First, it fails to take a stand. Second, the phrase negative and positive aspects is vague.

Because Banana Herb Tea Supplement promotes rapid weight loss that results in the loss of muscle and lean body mass, it poses a potential danger to customers.

This is a strong thesis because it takes a stand, and because it's specific.

2. A strong thesis statement justifies discussion.

Your thesis should indicate the point of the discussion. If your assignment is to write a paper on kinship systems, using your own family as an example, you might come up with either of these two thesis statements:

My family is an extended family.

This is a weak thesis because it merely states an observation. Your reader won’t be able to tell the point of the statement, and will probably stop reading.

While most American families would view consanguineal marriage as a threat to the nuclear family structure, many Iranian families, like my own, believe that these marriages help reinforce kinship ties in an extended family.

This is a strong thesis because it shows how your experience contradicts a widely-accepted view. A good strategy for creating a strong thesis is to show that the topic is controversial. Readers will be interested in reading the rest of the essay to see how you support your point.

3. A strong thesis statement expresses one main idea.

Readers need to be able to see that your paper has one main point. If your thesis statement expresses more than one idea, then you might confuse your readers about the subject of your paper. For example:

Companies need to exploit the marketing potential of the Internet, and Web pages can provide both advertising and customer support.

This is a weak thesis statement because the reader can’t decide whether the paper is about marketing on the Internet or Web pages. To revise the thesis, the relationship between the two ideas needs to become more clear. One way to revise the thesis would be to write:

Because the Internet is filled with tremendous marketing potential, companies should exploit this potential by using Web pages that offer both advertising and customer support.

This is a strong thesis because it shows that the two ideas are related. Hint: a great many clear and engaging thesis statements contain words like because, since, so, although, unless, and however.

4. A strong thesis statement is specific.

A thesis statement should show exactly what your paper will be about, and will help you keep your paper to a manageable topic. For example, if you're writing a seven-to-ten page paper on hunger, you might say:

World hunger has many causes and effects.

This is a weak thesis statement for two major reasons. First, world hunger can’t be discussed thoroughly in seven to ten pages. Second, many causes and effects is vague. You should be able to identify specific causes and effects. A revised thesis might look like this:

Hunger persists in Glandelinia because jobs are scarce and farming in the infertile soil is rarely profitable.

This is a strong thesis statement because it narrows the subject to a more specific and manageable topic, and it also identifies the specific causes for the existence of hunger.

Produced by Writing Tutorial Services, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

Materials for Students: Writing the Academic Paper: Developing Your Thesis

Developing Your Thesis

On this page:

Writing a Thesis Sentence

No sentence in your paper will vex you as much as the thesis sentence. And with good reason: the thesis sentence is typically that ONE sentence in the paper that asserts, controls, and structures the entire argument. Without a strong persuasive, thoughtful thesis, a paper might seem unfocused, weak, and not worth the reader's time.

Complicating the matter further is that different disciplines have different notions of what constitutes a good thesis sentence. Your English professor might frown on a thesis sentence that says, "This paper will argue X by asserting A, B, and C." Such a thesis would likely be seen as too formulaic. In a Social Science course, on the other hand, a good thesis might be crafted in just that way.

So what makes a good thesis sentence?

Despite the differences from discipline to discipline, a good thesis will generally have the following characteristics:

A good thesis sentence will make a claim.
This doesn't mean that you have to reduce an idea to an "either/or" proposition and then take a stand. Rather, you need to develop an interesting perspective that you can support and defend. This perspective must be more than an observation. "America is violent" is an observation. "Americans are violent because they are fearful" (the position that Michael Moore takes in Bowling for Columbine) is an argument. Why? Because it posits a perspective. It makes a claim.

Put another way, a good thesis sentence will inspire (rather than quiet) other points of view. One might argue that America is violent because of its violent entertainment industry. Or because of the proliferation of guns. Or because of the disintegration of the family. In short, if your thesis is positing something that no one can (or would wish to) argue with, then it's not a very good thesis.
A good thesis sentences will control the entire argument.
Your thesis sentence determines what you are required to say in a paper. It also determines what you cannot say. Every paragraph in your paper exists in order to support your thesis. Accordingly, if one of your paragraphs seems irrelevant to your thesis you have two choices: get rid of the paragraph, or rewrite your thesis.

Understand that you don't have a third option: you can't simply stick the idea in without preparing the reader for it in your thesis. The thesis is like a contract between you and your reader. If you introduce ideas that the reader isn't prepared for, you've violated that contract.
A good thesis will provide a structure for your argument.
A good thesis not only signals to the reader what your argument is, but how your argument will be presented. In other words, your thesis sentence should either directly or indirectly suggest the structure of your argument to your reader.

Say, for example, that you are going to argue that "American fearfulness expresses itself in three curious ways: A, B, and C." In this case, the reader understands that you are going to have three important points to cover, and that these points will appear in a certain order. If you suggest a particular ordering principle and then abandon it, the reader will feel betrayed, irritated, and confused.

Alternatives to the Thesis Sentence

Sometimes, the purpose of a piece of writing is not to make a claim but to raise questions. Other times, a writer wants to leave a matter unresolved, inspiring the reader to create his or her own position. In these cases, the thesis sentence might take other forms: the thesis question or the implied thesis.

The Thesis Question

As we've said, not every piece of writing sets out to make a claim. If your purpose as a writer is to explore, for instance, the reasons for the 9/11 attacks (a topic for which you are not prepared to make a claim), your thesis might read: "What forces conspired to bring these men to crash four jetliners into American soil?"

You'll note that this question, while provocative, does not offer a sense of the argument's structure. It permits the writer to pursue all ideas, without committing to any. While this freedom might seem appealing, in fact you will find that the lack of a declarative thesis statement requires more work: you need to tighten your internal structure and your transitions from paragraph to paragraph so that the essay is clear and the reader can easily follow your line of inquiry.

The Implied Thesis

One of the most fascinating things about a thesis sentence is that it is the most important sentence in a paper - even when it's not there.

Some of our best writers never explicitly declare their thesis. In some essays, you'll find it difficult to point to a single sentence that declares the argument. Still, the essay is coherent and makes a point. In these cases, the writers have used an implied thesis.

Writers use an implied thesis when they want the reader to come to his or her own conclusions about the matter at hand. However, just because the writer doesn't delcare the thesis doesn't mean that she was working without one. Good writers will have their thesis clearly stated - either in their own minds, or in their notes for the paper. They may elect not to put the thesis in the paper, but every paragraph, every sentence that they write is controlled by the thesis all the same.

If you decide to write a paper with an implied thesis, be sure that you have a strong grasp of your argument and its structure. Also be sure that you supply adequate transitions, so that the reader can follow your argument with ease.

Will This Thesis Sentence Make the Grade? (A Check List)

In the end, you may have spent a good deal of time writing your thesis and still not know if it's a good one. Here are some questions to ask yourself.

Does my thesis sentence attempt to answer (or at least to explore) a challenging intellectual question?
Is the point I'm making one that would generate discussion and argument, or is it one that would leave people asking, "So what?"
Is my thesis too vague? Too general? Should I focus on some more specific aspect of my topic?
Does my thesis deal directly with the topic at hand, or is it a declaration of my personal feelings?
Does my thesis indicate the direction of my argument? Does it suggest a structure for my paper?
Does my introductory paragraph define terms important to my thesis? If I am writing a research paper, does my introduction "place" my thesis within the larger, ongoing scholarly discussion about my topic?
Is the language in my thesis vivid and clear? Have I structured my sentence so that the important information is in the main clause? Have I used subordinate clauses to house less important information? Have I used parallelism to show the relationship between parts of my thesis? In short, is this thesis the very best sentence that it can be?

What else do you need to know about thesis sentences?

A good thesis usually relies on a strong introduction, sharing the work.
As your writing becomes more sophisticated, you will find that a one-sentence thesis statement cannot bear the burden of your entire argument. Therefore, you will find yourself relying increasingly on your introduction to lay the groundwork. Use your introduction to explain some of your argument's points and/or to define its terms. Save the "punch" for your thesis. For more information about creating good introductions that can support your thesis sentences, see Introductions and Conclusions elsewhere in this website.
The structure of your thesis, along with its introduction, should in some way reflect the logic that brought you to your argument.
It's helpful when structuring your thesis sentence to consider for a moment how it was that you came to your argument in the first place. No matter what discipline you are working in, you came to your idea by way of certain observations. For example, perhaps you have noticed in a History of Education course that female college students around the turn of the century seem very often to write about the idea of service to the community. How did you come to that observation? What did you observe first? And, more importantly, how did you go about exploring the significance of this observation? Did you investigate other college documents to see if the value of service was explicitly stated there? Or was this value implied in course descriptions, extra curricular possibilities, and so forth? Reconstruct for yourself how you came to your observations, and use this to help you to create a coherent introduction and thesis.
A good working thesis is your best friend.
Those writers who understand the concept of "working thesis" are way ahead of the game. A "working thesis" is a thesis that works for you, helping you to see where your ideas are going. Many students keep their thesis sentence in front of them at all times to help them to control the direction of their argument. But what happens when you stumble onto an idea that your thesis isn't prepared for? Or, more important, what happens when you think everything is going well in your paper and suddenly you arrive at a block? Always return to your working thesis, and give it a critical once-over. You may find that the block in your writing process is related to some limitation in your thesis. Or you may find that hidden somewhere in that working thesis is the germ of an even better idea. Stay in conversation with your thesis throughout the writing process. You'll be surprised at what you can learn from it.

Constructing the Thesis: A Writer's Clinic for Beginners

Constructing a good thesis sentence is no easy matter. In creating a thesis, the writer struggles with her own confusion. She seeks to create some order out of the morass of observations she has about a text. If you are willing to endure a little confusion, we'll show you here how it is that a thesis sentence is constructed. As the thesis will pass through several incarnations before it reaches its final form, we advise you to read this section completely from beginning to end.

Ready?

When structuring your thesis sentence, it's helpful to start by considering how it was that you came to your argument in the first place. You arrived at your point of view by way of certain observations and a particular logic. You will expect your reader to arrive at the same conclusion, via the same observations and logic that you yourself used.

Let's imagine that you have been assigned a novel for your Writing 5 class. You've noticed when reading the book that the author seems to linger on the relatively insignificant action of women putting on their lipstick. You've also noticed that lipstick stains abound in the novel, leaving their mark on glasses, sheets, and so on. Finally, you've noticed that the women characters use lipstick in different ways: Character A puts lipstick on alone in the bathroom, in front of a mirror; Character B puts lipstick on in front of others, but only when they seem on the verge of rejecting her; Character C delights in seeing her incriminating lipstick smears on the shirts and sheets of her lover; Character D wears lipstick only when she goes to have lunch with her ex-lover, as a way of exaggerating the grimace of her pain.

From these observations, you see a pattern at work. Characters A and B use lipstick to mask themselves and their feelings; Characters C and D use lipstick to unmask themselves (or others). Moreover, you notice that the author seems to admire Characters C and D for their insistence that emotions be revealed. You think that you have a good idea for a thesis sentence, and so you give it a go: "In X's novel , the characters' seemingly insignificant use of lipstick in fact points to one of the novel's larger themes: the masking and unmasking of the self."

This sentence does mirror for the reader your own process of discovery: it begins with an observation that a seemingly insignificant event has meaning(s) in the novel, and then it classifies those meanings into two categories. In other words, some of your logic is indeed present in the thesis as you've written it.

You'll notice that I've said "some of your logic." It's important to take a second look at this thesis to see what it is that's been left out.

Put yourself in the place of the reader. What does this thesis sentence tell you about the structure of the argument to come? Well, as a potential reader I would expect that first, the writer will provide evidence that lipstick is indeed an important symbol in this novel. Second, I would expect the writer to argue that lipstick signifies a character's desire to mask herself (a common observation). Finally, I would expect the writer to show me how, exactly, lipstick is used to reveal the self.

Now ask yourself what this thesis doesn'ttell the reader about the argument to come. We understand as readers that this paper is going to be about the masking and unmasking of the self. We understand (because it is common knowledge) that lipstick can be used to create a mask. But how, precisely, does lipstick unmask the self? Here you seem to be pointing to some uncommon use of lipstick, but you haven't even hinted at what that "uncommon use" is, or why it's important. Look closely at your thesis and ask yourself this hard question: Does my thesis give my reader a sense of the real argument to come?

In this case, it doesn't. However, this doesn't mean that the thesis sentence is useless. In fact, even though this thesis doesn't provide the reader with a very good "map" of the essay, it does help you, the writer, to see the overall structure of your argument. In other words, it's a good working thesis sentence for your paper.

What is a Working Thesis Sentence?

Let's take a minute to define this term.

A thesis sentence, as we've said, is a kind of contract between you and your reader. It asserts, controls, and structures your argument for your reader's ease. A working thesis sentence, on the other hand, is a sentence that you compose in order to make the work of writing easier. It's a sentence that asserts, controls, and structures the argument for you.

The working thesis need not be eloquent. In fact, it can be quite clunky, declaring your argument and then clumsily listing your supporting points. Not to worry: you'll be revising your thesis, and often more than once.

Remember that, as you write, you are bound to come up with new ideas and observations that you'd like to incorporate into your paper. Every time you make a new discovery, your thesis sentence will have to be revised. Sometimes you'll find that you're stuck in your writing. You may need to return to your thesis. Perhaps you haven't clearly defined an important term or condition in your thesis? Maybe that's why you find yourself unable to progress beyond a certain point in your argument?

Revising your working thesis at this juncture could help you to clarify for yourself the direction of your argument. Don't be afraid to revise! In fact, the most important quality of a working thesis sentence is its flexibility. A working thesis needs to keep up with your thinking. It needs to accommodate what you learn as you go along.

Revising the Working Thesis

Let's return now to our in-progress thesis: "In X's novel, the characters' seemingly insignificant use of lipstick in fact points to one of the novel's larger themes: the masking and unmasking of the self." Perhaps this thesis served you well as you were writing the first couple of pages of your paper, but now that you are into the meat of the matter, you are stuck. How, exactly, is the writer using lipstick and masks to reveal character? And what, precisely, is his point in doing so?

It's at this juncture that you'll probably return to your thesis and discover a) what it doesn't say, and b) what it needs to say. We've already determined that the sentence doesn't really address the most arguable - and interesting - aspect of this argument. Now it's time to ask yourself why this hasn't been addressed. Perhaps you, the writer, haven't yet articulated this part of the argument for yourself? Is this why the thesis (and with it, the paper) seems to trail off?

At this point you should stop drafting the paper and return to the text. Read a bit. Brainstorm a bit. Write another discovery draft. Read a bit more. Ohmygosh! Here is something interesting. You've found a passage in which the writer talks about how the lipstick left behind on a lover's shirt "drew a map for his wife into the dark lands of his infidelities." And you've found another passage in which the jilted lover's bright orange lipstick was "like a road sign, guiding her betrayer to the heart of her pain." In these two passages you see the writer addressing another function of lipstick: that women use it to draw a kind of map. You look for other lipstick examples that might shed more light on the idea of mapping, and you find them. Even better, you discover that all of these examples have something to do with betrayal, guilt, and shame.

In the end, you conclude that lipstick is not being used in this novel just to mask and unmask. Women also use lipstick to map. The two are in fact linked:

Lipstick masks by concealing real feelings (most often feelings of betrayal, guilt, and shame).
Lipstick masks, but in the process reveals or creates a new persona, one who overcomes the feelings of betrayal, guilt, and shame.
The author also uses the act of putting on lipstick as a metaphor for mapping. These maps might conceal - that is, they might serve to detour the observer from discovering (or arriving at) the woman's feelings of betrayal, or
They might reveal. First, lipstick might draw a map to the truth about a betrayal, as they do for the betrayed wife in the novel. And second, lipstick might be seen as a tool with which a woman maps herself, drawing new borders, re-imagining her own inner landscapes, and re-routing her own destiny.

This idea is very complicated. How do you make a thesis out of this?

Your first try is bound to be clumsy. You need to find a way of putting together all of your important ideas - lipsticks, masks, maps, concealing, revealing, betrayal - into one sentence. Can it be done?

Maybe; maybe not. Let's try:

While lipstick is used in X's novel to conceal feelings of betrayal, it is also used to reveal the betrayal itself, in that lipstick both masks and maps betrayal, at first allowing women to hide themselves, but later providing them with the possibility to create new selves, and to re-route their lives.

Does this sentence work?

Revising Your Thesis For Eloquence

Clearly not.

For one thing, it is simply too long. You are putting too much information into one sentence. Sometimes writers fail to understand that their argument might best be expressed in a couple of sentences (with one sentence providing background information and the second serving as the thesis). Note the difference such a change would make:

While lipstick is used in X's novel to conceal feelings of betrayal, it is also used to reveal the betrayal itself. Accordingly, lipstick both masks and maps betrayal in this novel, initially allowing women to hide themselves, but later providing them with the possibility to create new selves, and to re-route their lives.

Better? Sure, but it could be better still. You will, of course, want to play with your thesis sentence until it is strong enough to present your complex argument, and clear enough to guide your reader through your paper. But even more than this, you will want to write a thesis sentence that evokes something in the reader. You will want to use language that has some power; you will want to structure the sentence so that it has some "oomph." Pay attention to diction, to syntax, to nuance, and to tone. In short, write a good sentence.

Understand that you can revise the thesis sentence above in a number of ways. Ask yourself:

Is my argument clear?
Does it present the logic and the structure of my paper?
Does it emphasize the points I want to emphasize?

Perhaps in the end you decide that the previous sentence seems to make masking and mapping of equal importance to this paper. You've decided that mapping is the more original, stronger idea. So you revise once more, for emphasis. Consider this, then, our final thesis sentence (note how the complete argument now relies on the interaction between two introductory sentences and the thesis statement itself):

While at first it might appear that lipstick is being used merely to hide the characters' feelings of betrayal, a closer look reveals that its most essential use is actually to map the path to the betrayal itself. By using lipstick as the signposts, betrayal can be discovered and navigated. As a result, characters are able to re-draw the borders of their relationships, and to re-route the course of their lives.

Written by Karen Gocsik
Last modified: Tuesday, 12-Jul-2005 11:27:36 EDT
Copyright © 2004 Dartmouth College
www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/ac_paper/develop.shtml

The Thesis Statement

Discovering Ideas Handbook

1.4 The Thesis Statement

1.4.1 What Is a Thesis Statement?

1.4.1.1 A single sentence.
1.4.1.2 A declarative sentence.
1.4.1.3 States what you want your readers to know, believe, or understand.
1.4.1.4 After having read your essay.

1.4.2 Why Write a Thesis Statement?

1.4.2.1 Why do you need to develop a thesis statement when you write an essay?
1.4.2.2 What's the value of writing out your thesis statement on a piece of paper?
1.4.2.3 Seeing the relationship between your thesis statement and your essay.

1.4.3 How to Write a Thesis Statement

1.4.3.1 Ask and answer the questions "why?" and "how?" of your trial thesis statement.
1.4.3.2 Make your thesis statement a positive statement, not a negative one.
1.4.3.3 Use the active voice in every clause in your thesis statement.

1.4.4 Content of Your Thesis Statement

1.4.4.1 Make it clear.
1.4.4.2 Make it precise and limited.
1.4.4.3 Make it controversial or informative.
1.4.4.4 Make it defensible.

Checklist for Revising Thesis Statements

1.4.1 What Is a Thesis Statement?

We will be talking about thesis statements quite a bit this semester. We will be writing thesis statements, revising them, and using them as tools to help us revise our essays. So let me clarify what I mean by the term "thesis statement." By the way, some of the explanation that follows will be more specific or slightly different from some things you find in your handbook. Where there is any conflict, this document rules.

Perhaps the first step would be to clarify what I do not mean by the term "thesis statement." A thesis statement, as we will be using the term this semester, is not necessarily a sentence that appears in the first paragraph of your essay. Your thesis statement might appear in the first paragraph, or the last paragraph, or it might not appear in the essay at all. I do not mean by a thesis statement something that you necessarily write before writing the essay. I will often ask you to write a "trial thesis statement" before submitting a draft of your essay; the term "trial" means that this is not a thesis statement you are committed to. The only reason for asking for a trial thesis statement is to allow us to have something to discuss in class. You will usually not finish writing your thesis statement until you have nearly finished writing and revising your essay.

Because your thesis statement may or may not appear in the body of your essay, I will ask you to always put your thesis statement at the very end of your essay, labeled and printed as a separate paragraph after your last paragraph or after your list of works cited, if you have one.

So what is a thesis statement? A thesis statement is a single declarative sentence that states what you want your readers to know, believe, or understand after having read your essay. If we understand that definition, it will be a lot easier to work with thesis statements, so let's take a minute to break it down into its component parts and make sure we see what it contains.

1.4.1.1 A thesis statement is a single sentence.

A thesis statement, in other words, is only one sentence, not two or three or more. Why? Because the thesis statement is the main point you want to make in one essay; so it should be one sentence. Frederick Crews defines an essay as "a short piece of nonfiction that tries to make a point in an interesting way." What makes it an essay is that it aims to make a point, one point. This doesn't mean that you can only make one assertion in an essay. But it means that all of the many claims you make must fit together, that they must all support or lead to a single point (claim, conclusion) that defines the whole essay. And if everything you say in an essay supports a single point or claim, then you can express that claim in a single sentence. Notice that nobody is saying that it must be a short sentence or a pretty sentence. But it must be one sentence, not two or more sentences. If you can't express the main point of your essay in one sentence, your essay probably doesn't have one point; it probably has two. And that means it should be two essays. Feel free to write them both, but one at a time.

1.4.1.2 A thesis statement is a single declarative sentence.

A declarative sentence is simply a sentence that makes a statement rather than asking a question or making a command. It is really saying the same thing twice to say that a thesis statement is a declarative sentence. It just means that a thesis statement is a statement. The repetition is for emphasis; it helps us to keep in mind that a thesis statement is not a question. You may often start work on your essay with a question in mind. That's a good idea. But the question is not your thesis statement. Your thesis statement will be the answer to the question, an answer that you will defend and explain in your essay.

1.4.1.3 A thesis statement is a single declarative sentence that states what you want your readers to know, believe, or understand.

Different essays will have different purposes, depending on your message and your audience. If you are writing about a topic that your readers know very little about, you will write differently than you would if you were writing about a topic about which your readers were well informed. Some textbooks attempt to break down the kinds of essays into categories like "informative," "persuasive," "expository," or "argumentative." These categories can sometimes be useful in thinking about your essay, but they are always a little artificial. No good essay is entirely informative or entirely persuasive. Almost any good essay will have to inform the reader at some points and persuade the reader at others. But every good essay is unified, moves toward a single major point. Thus every good essay has a thesis statement, though it may be implied rather than explicitly stated in the text of the essay. If you are writing a primarily "informative" essay rather than a primarily "persuasive" essay, that doesn't mean your essay doesn't have a thesis; it just means that your thesis is a statement about which your readers are uninformed, rather than one on which they may have opinions that differ from yours. Whatever kind of essay you are writing, you want to decide before you finish it what the point will be, where it's going. Thus you want your thesis statement to express in a sentence what your whole essay says, what you want your readers to know or believe or understand by the end of the essay. You don't just want the thesis statement to be a general conclusion that someone might reach from your essay; you want it to say what your essay says. One problem with many, perhaps most, trial thesis statements is that they are too general and hence do not really give any guidance as to what issues and what evidence will be in this essay.

1.4.1.4 A thesis statement is a single declarative sentence that states what you want your readers to know, believe, or understand after having read your essay.

You may have been asked in a previous class to put your thesis statement in the first paragraph of your essay. There is nothing wrong with putting the thesis statement in the first paragraph, if that will help you to get your point across to your readers. But many excellent essays do not state the thesis statement in the first paragraph. The decision as to whether to do so should be based on what will work best with your subject and your readers. However, the tradition of putting the thesis in the first paragraph has led some students to mistakenly think of the thesis statement as a kind of introduction to the essay. In some cases, the thesis statement works well as part of the introduction; in some cases it doesn't. But a thesis statement is not necessarily part of the introduction, and in developing your thesis statement you should not be thinking primarily about how you want your essay to start. You should be thinking about what you want the whole essay to say, what you want the reader to know or believe at the end of the essay, not the beginning. This is why you often cannot finish your thesis statement until you finish your essay.

1.4.2 Why Write a Thesis Statement?

Why should you write a thesis statement when you write an essay? What is it good for? Is it just busy work? Something English teachers are required to impose on students to keep them from having any free time? One of those long traditions that everyone has forgotten the reason for? I don't think so. Developing a thesis statement is an important part of the process of writing an essay. In fact, you really can't write a good essay without developing a thesis statement. Of course, to "develop" a thesis statement doesn't necessarily require writing it down on a piece of paper and handing it in with your essay. But that is what I will ask you to do for every essay you write. So I'll have to answer this question in two parts: First, why do you need to develop a thesis statement? Second, why do I ask you to write it down and hand it in?

1.4.2.1 Why do you need to develop a thesis statement when you write and essay?

First, why do you need to develop a thesis statement when you write an essay? The reason is that, using the definition of a thesis statement given above, you can't write a good essay without one. In fact, it flows from the definition of an essay that an essay cannot fail to have a thesis. An essay is "a short piece of nonfiction that tries to make a point in an interesting way." The thesis statement, as we have defined it, is merely a statement of the point the essay makes. If it doesn't make a point, if it's just a random bunch of paragraphs about the same topic that never come to any conclusion, then it isn't really an essay. Notice that the definition says that an essay tries to make a point in an interesting way. Most essays don't completely succeed for all readers. Having a thesis is no guarantee of a good essay. You might try to make a point, and fail. But if you don't have a point to make, if you don't have a thesis, then you can't possibly succeed.

When I talk about "having a thesis," I don't mean that you have to have the thesis before writing the essay. When you write you are creating ideas. One of the things that makes writing so interesting and exciting is that, in the process of writing, you almost always discover ideas and connections between ideas that you didn't recognize before. Even if you have a clear idea of what you think you want to say before you start to write, you will usually discover that in the process of writing your idea changes. Often you will have to start writing with only a question to answer or a topic to explore, and you'll have to write your way to a thesis. You will keep revising your thesis statement as you revise your essay. Where the thesis statement is most important is at the end of the process, during revision. You want your essay to come to a point, to have a clear thesis that every reader will understand.

1.4.2.2 What's the value of writing out your thesis statement on a piece of paper?

This brings us to the second question. Even if we accept that every good essay does have a thesis statement, often that thesis is implied by the essay and not explicitly stated. But I am going to ask you to submit your thesis statement in writing with every draft and every essay you write. What's the value of writing out your thesis statement on a piece of paper? If you know the point you are trying to make, isn't that enough? The basic answer is "yes." If you really do know what you're trying to say in the paper, if it's crystal clear in your own mind, then it really isn't necessary for you to write down your thesis and label it in order to produce a good essay. On the other hand, if your thesis is clear in your mind, it is very easy to write it down on a piece of paper. It just takes a few seconds. No problem. Unfortunately, most of us are not absolutely clear in our minds about what point we are making when we write. Even when we think we know exactly what we want to say, we often discover when we start to write it down that it isn't all there. The main reason I ask you to write down your thesis statement and submit it before, during, and after you write your essay is that we will use the trial thesis statement as a tool to discuss and revise your essay.

1.4.2.3 Seeing the relationship between your thesis statement and your essay.

Think of your essay as a building. You are the architect. As you design the building you construct a scale model so that you and your clients can see what the finished building will look like. It doesn't have all the detail the finished building will, but it does allow us to see the shape and overall design. If you make changes in the design, you will alter the scale model. People's reactions to the scale model may help you to decide how to alter the design. Your thesis statement is to your essay as the scale model is to the building. Until construction is complete, you can always make changes. And so your scale model will not be "final" until the building is finished. If you think of the thesis statement as a scale model of your essay, you can see why your thesis statement must evolve and develop as your essay does, and you won't worry about having a finished thesis statement until you have a finished essay. But you will recognize that in working on your thesis statement you are working on your essay. If the thesis statement is a good model of your essay--if everything in the essay is reflected in the thesis statement and everything in the thesis statement is developed in the essay--then we can give you useful feedback on your trial thesis statement that will help you to decide how to revise your essay.

Having to develop a written thesis statement along with your essay also helps you to discover problems with your essay and solve them. For example, unless you have a very clear idea of what you want to say when you start writing your essay, you are likely to "drift" as you write the first draft. That is to say, you will change your argument as you develop it. This is a good thing because you usually improve your argument as you change it. But it often results in a draft that starts out by posing one question and ends up by answering a different one. The essay will often seem to be two separate half-essays pasted together in the middle. This problem is usually not hard to fix, but it may be hard for you to see at first because you are so close to the essay that you have just written. A thesis statement can help you to recognize that your essay has changed from its original intention. And in trying to revise your thesis statement so that it summarizes your whole essay, you will see that that is an impossible task until you have settled on a single direction in which to revise the essay. If you think of the thesis statement as a scale model of your essay, it will point you toward answers to many of the questions that arise in the process of revision.

Sometimes it will not be easy to see the relationship between your thesis statement and your essay. This can be frustrating. You may be tempted to think that if you could just ignore the thesis statement your essay would be fine. Usually, this is wishful thinking. One of the reasons why it may be hard to come up with a thesis statement that matches your essay is that you haven't really decided what you want to say in the essay. You may have seven or ten decent paragraphs down on paper. They might even be interesting. But if you can't say for sure what they add up to, what point they make, you probably don't have an essay yet. A good thesis statement will tell you when you have finished. This may not sound important, but it is. One of the hardest things about writing good essays--even for very experienced writers--is knowing when you're finished, knowing when you should stop revising, knowing when you've reached the end of the process. Most essays that don't work very well fail because they were never completed. And one reason we hand in incomplete essays is that we don't know how to tell when they are finished. If you make the effort to really develop and revise your thesis statement, you will find that it gets much easier to tell when the finished essay has done what it needs to do.

1.4.3 How to Write a Thesis Statement

If you understand why you are writing a thesis statement, it will be easier to write one. To get started, use whatever techniques seem to work for you: freewriting, clustering, talking it over with friends, brainstorming. By the time you write a thesis statement, we will have discussed the topic in class, and you will have an idea how your fellow students--your audience for the essay--are thinking about it. You will have read about the general topic and written on your reading. Throughout the whole process of reading, writing, and discussing the topic in class, be on the lookout for questions and problems that interest you. Don't try to think of the one perfect topic for an essay; there probably isn't one. Try to think of interesting issues, several of them. I'll probably ask you to suggest three or four topics that might lead to interesting essays.

Once you have a topic, the actual development of a thesis statement begins. At first, your goal is just to get your rough idea down on paper. You should not expect to just sit down and write a perfect thesis statement. It doesn't work that way. Your first trial thesis statement is only a rough approximation of what you will eventually end up saying. But it gives you something to work with, something to improve. Usually, the process of revising a trial thesis statement consists of making your point clearer and more specific, narrowing down and filling in what you can really do in the essay, saying more about less. This is a process that writers have to go through in order to produce good work. It's normal and healthy. It's a form of success, not a sign of failure. If you expect not to have to revise your thesis statement, you are bound to feel bad when you do. It's the false expectation that causes the problem. So expect to revise your thesis statement and you will neither be surprised or disappointed. You can just get on with it.

Your handbook has good advice on how to revise a trial thesis statement. My suggestions here are just a supplement to your handbook, not a substitute for it. Several of the most important things you want to look for I have already mentioned while discussing the definition of a thesis statement. In addition to those, the following techniques can be useful in revising and trying to improve a thesis statement once you have one to work with.

1.4.3.1 Ask and answer the questions "why?" and "how?" of your trial thesis statement.

One of the most common problems with a trial thesis statement is that you have given the final conclusion you want to reach in the essay, but you haven't stated your reasons. Often you will devote much more space in your essay to giving reasons than to stating conclusions. A quick test is to look at your trial thesis statement and see if it makes sense to ask either "why?" or "how?" of your thesis statement as you have written it. If it does, then answer the question and write the answer down. The answer to that question will often be a better thesis statement than your original.

Some thesis statements need to state both a conclusion and a premise. Often these take the form of "X because Y." If you don't answer the question "why?" in your trial thesis statement, try adding a "because clause." If you do so, be careful to make it a clause and not a phrase. That is, make it a group of words with a subject and a verb, not just a string of nouns and modifiers. If you use "because" in your thesis statement, don't ever follow it with "of." "Because of" leads to a prepositional phrase; it will give you a static topic, but won't tell who is doing what to whom. Always use "because" in the form "because somebody does something."

1.4.3.2 Make your thesis statement a positive statement, not a negative one.

Tell us what somebody did, not what they didn't do; what caused the problem, not what didn't cause it; what you know, not what you don't know. Be very careful about using the word "not" in a thesis statement. The problem with making your thesis statement a negative claim is that the only way to support it is by making a positive claim. So if your thesis statement is worded negatively, you probably haven't said what you need to say yet. Notice that if you ask the question "why?" of a negative claim, you will almost always have to answer it with a positive one. This suggestion is about the wording of your thesis, not your attitude. I don't mean that your statement must be "positive" in the sense of optimistic, just that it must be worded as a positive claim, rather than one that uses terms like "not."

1.4.3.3 Use the active voice in every clause in your thesis statement.

Clauses that use transitive verbs are in either the active or the passive voice. A transitive verb is an action verb that transmits the action to a receiver. An example would be the verb "throw" in the sentence "Jane throws the ball." The action, throwing, is transmitted from the doer, Jane, to a receiver, the ball. When a transitive verb is in the active voice, as in this example, the doer of the action is the subject of the sentence or clause. Jane did the throwing, she does the action, she is the subject of the sentence. When such a clause is in the passive voice, the receiver is the subject of the sentence: "The ball was thrown by Jane." All of these terms are also defined in your handbook. Look them up if you need to, as often as you need to, until the meanings become clear. And don't hesitate to ask questions if you are confused.

Most of the time, the active voice is clearer, more informative, and more direct than the passive voice or than clauses using linking verbs (for example, "is" or "was"). But we are sometimes, though very rarely, justified in using the passive voice in writing for variety or emphasis. But when we are writing thesis statements, I think we should always use the active voice when we can. And we almost always can. We want a thesis statement to express action, not just join topics together. We want a thesis statement to express what we are going to say, not just what we are going to write about. If we try to put every clause in every thesis statement in the active voice it will help us to find out what we really want to say and to write better essays faster.

One corollary to the rule that we should use the active voice is that we should never, or hardly ever, use a form of the verb "to be" as the main verb in a clause. So if you find yourself using a verb like "is," "are," "was," or "were" as a linking verb rather than just a helping verb, revise. Ask yourself "Who's doing what? Who's kicking who?" And rewrite your thesis statement in the active voice.

If you still find the concept of the active voice confusing or difficult, don't think you're the only one. Many students come into English Composition without a clear understanding of the idea of voice. But it is important. So please do the tutorial on The Active Voice.

1.4.4 Content of Your Thesis Statement

So far, we have been discussing fairly formal tests of a thesis. But as you start working with actual thesis statement, you will have to look at the meaning of the thesis, the ideas it contains, and ask whether what your thesis says expresses the right content, the meaning you want the essay to have.

1.4.4.1 Make it clear and unambiguous.

Make sure it couldn't be interpreted to mean something other than what you want it to mean. It should be unambiguous. Ask whether the sentence could mean different things to different people. If it could, revise it to remove the possible meanings that you don't want to convey.

1.4.4.2 Make it precise and limited.

State no more than you are willing to defend. Probably the most common problem with trial thesis statements is that they are too broad, that they claim too much. In a good essay, you will say more about less, not less about more. That is, you will develop your essay through specifics, examples, evidence of some detail that you can directly relate to your own experience or to specific sources. The test is will you answer the question "how do you know?" to the satisfaction of your readers for every major claim you make?

1.4.4.3 Make it controversial or informative.

Your thesis statement should be a statement about which your audience's knowledge or thinking is deficient or erroneous. You should be telling them something they don't already know or don't already believe. The point you make in your essay shouldn't be obvious. If most of your readers are likely to believe your thesis without even reading your essay, you probably don't need to write an essay to support that thesis.

1.4.4.4 Make it defensible.

Can you move your audience to accept this thesis statement in an essay of the length you propose to write? Just as you can't write a very good essay pointing out something that is already obvious to your readers, you shouldn't make a claim that is so controversial that you really don't have a chance of getting your readers to accept it.

Remember, for all working drafts and essays, you will put your thesis statement for the essay at the very end, as the last lines in the document, labeled "Thesis Statement."

Checklist for Revising Thesis Statements

Use this checklist to revise your trial thesis statement. Each item in the list is liked back to its explanation above. For a copy of this checklist that can be printed out on one page for easy reference, click here.

Use the On-line Tutor to help in Developing Your Thesis Statement.

1.5 Writing a First Draft

Handbook Table of Contents

Discovering Information Class Page

Thesis Statements

What this handout is about

This handout describes what a thesis statement is, how thesis statements work in your writing, and how you can discover or refine one for your draft.

Introduction

Writing in college often takes the form of persuasion—convincing others that you have an interesting, logical point of view on the subject you are studying. Persuasion is a skill you practice regularly in your daily life. You persuade your roommate to clean up, your parents to let you borrow the car, your friend to vote for your favorite candidate or policy. In college, course assignments often ask you to make a persuasive case in writing. You are asked to convince your reader of your point of view. This form of persuasion, often called academic argument, follows a predictable pattern in writing. After a brief introduction of your topic, you state your point of view on the topic directly and often in one sentence. This sentence is the thesis statement, and it serves as a summary of the argument you'll make in the rest of your paper.

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What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement:

tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion.
is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper.
directly answers the question asked of you. A thesis is an interpretation of a question or subject, not the subject itself. The subject, or topic, of an essay might be World War II or Moby Dick; a thesis must then offer a way to understand the war or the novel.
makes a claim that others might dispute.
is usually a single sentence somewhere in your first paragraph that presents your argument to the reader. The rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers and organizes evidence that will persuade the reader of the logic of your interpretation.

If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt, ask your instructor if the assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze, to interpret, to compare and contrast, to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout on understanding assignments for more information.)

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How do I get a thesis?

A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a "working thesis," a basic or main idea, an argument that you think you can support with evidence but that may need adjustment along the way.

Writers use all kinds of techniques to stimulate their thinking and to help them clarify relationships or comprehend the broader significance of a topic and arrive at a thesis statement. For more ideas on how to get started, see our handout on brainstorming.

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How do I know if my thesis is strong?

If there's time, run it by your instructor or make an appointment at the Writing Center to get some feedback. Even if you do not have time to get advice elsewhere, you can do some thesis evaluation of your own. When reviewing your first draft and its working thesis, ask yourself the following:

Do I answer the question? Re-reading the question prompt after constructing a working thesis can help you fix an argument that misses the focus of the question.
Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose?If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it's possible that you are simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.
Is my thesis statement specific enough?

why

what specifically

Does my thesis pass the "So what?" test? If a reader's first response is, "So what?" then you need to clarify, to forge a relationship, or to connect to a larger issue.
Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering? If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. It's o.k. to change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured out in the course of writing your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as necessary.
Does my thesis pass the "how and why?" test? If a reader's first response is "how?" or "why?" your thesis may be too open-ended and lack guidance for the reader. See what you can add to give the reader a better take on your position right from the beginning.

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Examples

Suppose you are taking a course on 19th-century America, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment: Compare and contrast the reasons why the North and South fought the Civil War. You turn on the computer and type out the following:

The North and South fought the Civil War for many reasons, some of which were the same and some different.

This weak thesis restates the question without providing any additional information. You will expand on this new information in the body of the essay, but it is important that the reader know where you are heading. A reader of this weak thesis might think, "What reasons? How are they the same? How are they different?" Ask yourself these same questions and begin to compare Northern and Southern attitudes (perhaps you first think, "The South believed slavery was right, and the North thought slavery was wrong"). Now, push your comparison toward an interpretation—why did one side think slavery was right and the other side think it was wrong? You look again at the evidence, and you decide that you are going to argue that the North believed slavery was immoral while the South believed it upheld the Southern way of life. You write:

While both sides fought the Civil War over the issue of slavery, the North fought for moral reasons while the South fought to preserve its own institutions.

Now you have a working thesis! Included in this working thesis is a reason for the war and some idea of how the two sides disagreed over this reason. As you write the essay, you will probably begin to characterize these differences more precisely, and your working thesis may start to seem too vague. Maybe you decide that both sides fought for moral reasons, and that they just focused on different moral issues. You end up revising the working thesis into a final thesis that really captures the argument in your paper:

While both Northerners and Southerners believed they fought against tyranny and oppression, Northerners focused on the oppression of slaves while Southerners defended their own right to self-government.

Compare this to the original weak thesis. This final thesis presents a way of interpreting evidence that illuminates the significance of the question. Keep in mind that this is one of many possible interpretations of the Civil War—it is not the one and only right answer to the question. There isn't one right answer; there are only strong and weak thesis statements and strong and weak uses of evidence.

Let's look at another example. Suppose your literature professor hands out the following assignment in a class on the American novel: Write an analysis of some aspect of Mark Twain's novel Huckleberry Finn. "This will be easy," you think. "I loved Huckleberry Finn!" You grab a pad of paper and write:

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.

Why is this thesis weak? Think about what the reader would expect from the essay that follows: you will most likely provide a general, appreciative summary of Twain's novel. The question did not ask you to summarize; it asked you to analyze. Your professor is probably not interested in your opinion of the novel; instead, she wants you to think about whyit's such a great novel—what do Huck's adventures tell us about life, about America, about coming of age, about race relations, etc.? First, the question asks you to pick an aspect of the novel that you think is important to its structure or meaning—for example, the role of storytelling, the contrasting scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships between adults and children. Now you write:

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.

Here's a working thesis with potential: you have highlighted an important aspect of the novel for investigation; however, it's still not clear what your analysis will reveal. Your reader is intrigued, but is still thinking, "So what? What's the point of this contrast? What does it signify?" Perhaps you are not sure yet, either. That's fine—begin to work on comparing scenes from the book and see what you discover. Free write, make lists, jot down Huck's actions and reactions. Eventually you will be able to clarify for yourself, and then for the reader, why this contrast matters. After examining the evidence and considering your own insights, you write:

Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain's Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must leave "civilized" society and go back to nature.

This final thesis statement presents an interpretation of a literary work based on an analysis of its content. Of course, for the essay itself to be successful, you must now present evidence from the novel that will convince the reader of your interpretation.

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Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing the original version of this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout's topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find the latest publications on this topic. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial.

Anson, Chris M. and Robert A. Schwegler. The Longman Handbook for Writers. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 2000.

Hairston, Maxine and John J. Ruszkiewicz. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers. 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

Lunsford, Andrea and Robert Connors. The St. Martin's Handbook. 3rd ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.

Rosen, Leonard J. and Laurence Behrens. The Allyn & Bacon Handbook. 3rd ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997.

Questions about External PhD Examiners | Ask Metafilter

Questions about External PhD Examiners | Ask Metafilter: "Questions about External PhD Examiners
June 8, 2007 7:31 AM RSS feed for this thread Subscribe
PhD students and graduates: If you have/had an external examiner on your committee, can you talk about how you choose them, approached them, interacted with them, what role they played relative to other members of your committee, etc?

I'm getting ahead of myself, but wanted to give it some thought earlier rather than later. I know my advisor will help me with the process when I get to this stage, but I'd like to think ahead a bit and find out what other peoples experiences were.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow to education (18 comments total)"

Postgraduate Forum | Accountability Partners - Write your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day

Friday 3 April 2009

Nasty PhD Viva Questions

Dr. Andrew Broad
Computer Science
CS710
Nasty PhD Viva Questions

A PhD candidate needs to anticipate the questions that are likely to be asked in the viva - the "horrible ordeal where you have to defend your thesis in person before they rip you to shreds." Actually, it's not nearly as bad as it sounds, provided that you enter it having prepared to your utmost.

There are three reasons why PhD candidates have to have a viva: it is so the examiners can see:

whether it is your own work;
whether you understand what you did;
whether it is worth a PhD (i.e. is a contribution to knowledge).

These are the points being examined (according to Alex Gray from the University of Cardiff):

Understanding: that you're ready to become an independent researcher.
Relationship to other work: that you have a command of your subject-area. Similarity to the work of others doesn't detract from novelty!
Novelty - is your work publishable? If you have already published a couple of papers, that should be proof of sufficient originality. Don't panic about recent publications that are very similar to your work - the important thing is to be aware of them, and to know the differences between your work and theirs.
What you have achieved, and that you are aware of its implications. What will it make a difference to?
Demonstration of hypothesis (what you set out to achieve). How have you evaluated/tested your hypothesis? Always be prepared to reconsider your hypothesis if you end up demonstrating something else - it's vitally important that your results match your hypothesis, and that you have a convincing argument for this.
Why did you do it the way you did? Not just your practical work, but everything. For example, your literature review should be focused towards your hypothesis.

Preparing for the Viva: Before you submit

It's crucial to get the philosophy of your thesis (as set out in your Chapter 1) absolutely correct, and clear in your mind by the time of the viva, because if the examiners find holes, they'll run rings round you.

They could ask you to explain/justify any statement in the thesis, so beware of baring nasty branches for clarification at the viva! Identify the contentious statements in the thesis, which you anticipate having to defend in the viva. A good supervisor will point out the contentious statements and grill you over them. Start a file of anticipated viva questions.

The conclusion chapter is a major one to focus on in anticipating viva questions - especially where you criticise your work!

Obviously, it's essential to know your own thesis thoroughly. I think it's a great idea to compile a brief summary of each section before you submit - enough to remind you of what's in each section, paragraph by paragraph or similar (my thesis summary is very different to, and shorter than, my thesis plan, where I basically wrote down all the points I could think of, then when I wrote it up, I added and deleted points, and changed the structure). Compiling a thesis summary before you submit has the advantages that you may spot strategic-level flaws in time to fix them, and will enable you to revise for the viva from the thesis summary rather than from the thesis itself.

Don't try to get the thesis perfect and free of minor corrections at the expense of delaying submission. It's almost certain that the examiners will find something to correct, anyway.

Preparing for the Viva: After you submit

The most important goal in preparing for the viva is to keep the subject alive in your head.

Try to anticipate the questions you'll be asked in your viva and keep working on a file of anticipated questions (both the generic questions listed on this web-page, and questions specific to particular sections of your thesis) and your answers. If you said anything without understanding it 100%, or anything you have doubts about having justified properly, add it to your viva file.

You can go into university after you've submitted your thesis and your registration has expired - doing some more practical work may (or may not) help to keep the subject alive in your head (you could do experiments and take printouts of the results to the viva).

However, the main preparation for the viva is reading. These are the things to prioritise:

Know your thesis inside-out. Compile a thesis summary (see above) if you didn't do so before you submitted - revising from that rather than from the thesis itself will help you focus on the strategic level (a half-line summary of each paragraph in the thesis should suffice to remind you of every important point in the thesis). You should read your thesis summary in a continuous cycle while you're waiting for the viva, and you should read the thesis itself at least once after you submit it and before the viva. Try to read it from the perspective of the examiners.
- If your thesis contains mathematical formulae, check them carefully so that you're confident, by the time of the viva, that they're correct. If they're not correct, work it out in advance so that you're not flustered by mathematical mistakes at the viva.
Be familiar with the references cited in your thesis, because that's the literature your examiners are most likely to ask you about. Read anything you have cited without reading (not that you should cite things without reading in the first place!).
The examiners could also ask you about literature not in the thesis, to test whether you are widely-read in your area.
- So make sure you're familiar with the literature - not everything you've read in the last three years, but the more important stuff.
- Look for recent review/survey papers of related areas. You need to be able to discuss the state of the art in any area related to your thesis.
- Recent publications tend to be particularly important (what are the recent developments in your field?), although they can't ask you about anything published after you submitted your thesis.
- Read the examiners' publications to get a feel for where they're coming from, what things they consider important, and which topics they consider relevant.
- Don't stop reading until after the viva.

It might be an idea to publish a paper or two between submitting your thesis and the viva - I wish I had done so. Try to write papers from different perspectives.

The time between submitting the thesis and the viva varies greatly. I submitted my thesis on 28th September 2001, and had my viva on 18th September 2002! My thesis was very long (390 pages including appendices), and there was a delay in finding a suitable external examiner, but above all you have to remember that your examiners will be busy with other things too!

The shortest time I've heard of between submission and viva is three weeks (different subject, different university).

They have to give you at least two weeks' notice before the viva. I got five weeks' notice. My internal examiner suggested a couple of dates, I chose 18th September and asked for 14:00 in IT406, and this was officially confirmed a few days later.

The Viva itself

The PhD viva is an open-book exam: you can bring any materials you want. Here is what I think one should bring to the viva:

a copy of your thesis, obviously - you can stick yellow `post-it' notes on it (e.g. anticipated questions and answers), although I personally abhorred the idea of preparing from my thesis itself;
your list of anticipated viva questions and your answers;
printouts of the results of any post-submission experiments;
the chapter-summaries you made for revision;
all the notebooks you should have been keeping since the start of your research (the notebooks need to be indexed so that you can look things up);
any papers such that when you reviewed them in the thesis, you regurgitated something they said blindly without really understanding it (in my case, I identified two such papers, but I brought a dozen potentially contentious papers to the viva);
printouts of any files or emails containing useful ideas which you haven't documented elsewhere;
tissues, paracetemol, &c. in case of any unexpected bouts of sneezing, headaches, &c.

At my viva, I gave a presentation (using slides) about some experiments I did after I submitted my thesis. But it's unusual for the candidate to give a presentation, and your supervisor should advise you if it is appropriate to do this. If you do give a presentation, be prepared to be flexible - I was asked to speed up and just give the highlights.

It is not the norm, in this department (I do not speak for other departments/universities), to be expected to give a practical demonstration of your work at the viva, but you could always offer to do so if you think it will help your cause (unlikely).

Anyone can attend a PhD viva, but only the examiners and the candidate can participate. (This means it may be a good idea to attend someone else's viva before your own, though I've never had the balls to gate-crash a viva! :-o )

Your supervisor should definitely attend your viva, although (s)he is usually not allowed to participate unless invited to do so by the examiners. It might be an idea to keep an eye on the body-language of your supervisor to see if you're going wrong! ;-)

A viva typically lasts two hours (but as long as it takes - mine lasted 2h22m), and a common approach is for the examiners to go through the thesis sequentially, asking questions.

Just because they ask a lot of questions doesn't mean you're going to fail. They don't give away the result before or during the viva, but you may be asked to wait around for the result at the end (about half an hour), so that they can explain the result to you - particularly if you have to resubmit your thesis (failure without the option of resubmission is very rare, and is not going to happen if you submit anything resembling a sensible thesis).

Tips:

Relax and enjoy it, if possible!
Ideas should flow out from you without a lot of prompting.
Listen carefully to the questions and take your time answering them.
Answer your questions succinctly (a rough guideline is 2 to 3 minutes each - no 20-minute diatribes!). Avoid going off at a tangent.
Try to make your answers initially inclusive (spot overlaps), analytical, and then if appropriate dismissive or point out the limitations - and the effects of these limits.
Generic viva questions, such as the ones given in the section below, require imagination to answer well!
Answers may utilise a wide variety of examples and domains. They are a test of your breadth of knowledge as well as depth of knowledge which is expected of a PhD student.
Handling difficult questions:

If you don't understand the question, ask for clarification. Paraphrase the question in your own words and say, "is this what you mean?" State your assumptions.
Treat vague questions as invitations to tell the examiners that you know your area and how it fits into related areas. Try to link the question to the questions you have anticipated and their stock answers. After writing a thesis, you should have one big, connected network of discussion in your head, so you need to jump in at the appropriate place for a given question.
If they have a misconception about your work, try to pin it down and explain it.
If you think the question is irrelevant, explain why you think it is irrelevant (it may be that you need to be more broad-minded).
If you really can't answer a question:

Be honest.
If you have any idea at all, say it.
Say, "I can't answer this on the spot, but I should be able to work it out in my own time."
If it's about literature you haven't come across, thank the questionner and ask for a reference.

Typical Viva Questions

Here are some generic viva-questions - you should instantiate each question for your particular thesis, and have a framework for answering it worked out before the viva.

I have tried to cluster related questions together here - they are not necessarily in order of importance, nor in the order that they are likely to be asked at the viva.

General Questions

What is the area in which you wish to be examined? (particularly difficult and important if your thesis fits into several areas, or has several aspects, or seems to fit into an area of its own as mine does).

In one sentence, what is your thesis? (Resist the temptation to run from the room!)

What have you done that merits a PhD?

Summarise your key findings.

What are you most proud of, and why? This may be asked (again) towards the end of the viva.

What's original about your work? Where is the novelty? Don't leave it to the examiners to make up their own minds - they may get it wrong!

What are the contributions (to knowledge) of your thesis?

Which topics overlap with your area?
For topic X:
- How does your work relate to X?
- What do you know about the history of X?
- What is the current state of the art in X? (capabilities and limitations of existing systems)
  What techniques are commonly used?
  Where do current technologies fail such that you (could) make a contribution?
- How does/could your work enhance the state of the art in X?
- Who are the main `players' in X? (Hint: you should cluster together papers written by the same people)
  Who are your closest competitors?
- What do you do better than them? What do you do worse?
- Which are the three most important papers in X?
- What are the recent major developments in X?
- How do you expect X to progress over the next five years? How long-term is your contribution, given the anticipated future developments in X?

What did you do for your MPhil, and how does your PhD extend it? Did you make any changes to the system you implemented for your MPhil?

What are the strongest/weakest parts of your work?

Where did you go wrong?
Why have you done it this way? You need to justify your approach - don't assume the examiners share your views.

What are the alternatives to your approach?
What do you gain by your approach?
What would you gain by approach X?

Why didn't you do it this way (the way everyone else does it)? This requires having done extensive reading. Be honest if you never thought of the alternative they're suggesting, or if you just didn't get around to it. If you try to bluff your way out, they'll trap you in your own words.

Looking back, what might you have done differently? This requires a thoughtful answer, whilst defending what you did at the time.

How do scientists/philosophers carry out experiments?

How have you evaluated your work?

intrinsic evaluation: how have you demonstrated that it works, and how well it performs?
extrinsic evaluation: how have you demonstrated its usefulness for a specific application context?

What do your results mean?

How would your system cope with bigger examples? Does it scale up? This is especially important if you have only run your system on `toy' examples, and they think it has `learned its test-data'.

How do you know that your algorithm/rules are correct?

How could you improve your work?

What are the motivations for your research? Why is the problem you have tackled worth tackling?

What is the relevance of your contributions?
- to other researchers?
- to industry?

What is the implication of your work in your area? What does it change?

How do/would you cope with known problems in your field? (e.g. combinatorial explosion)

Have you solved the field's problem that you claim to have solved? For example, if something is too slow, and you can make it go faster - how much increase in speed is needed for the applications you claim to support?

Is your field going in the right direction? For example, if everyone's been concentrating on speed, but the real issue is space (if the issue is time, you can just wait it out (unless it's combinatorially explosive), but if the issue is space, the system could fall over). This is kind of justifying why you have gone into the field you're working in.

Who are your envisioned users? What use would your work be in situation X?

How do your contributions generalise?
To what extent would they generalise to systems other than the one you've worked on?
Under what circumstances would your approach be useable? (Again, does it scale up?)

Where will you publish your work? Think about which journals and conferences your research would best suit. Just as popular musicians promote their latest albums by releasing singles and going on tour, you should promote your thesis by publishing papers in journals and presenting them at conferences. This takes your work to a much wider audience; this is how academics establish themselves.

Which aspects of your thesis could be published?

What have you learned from the process of doing your PhD? Remember that the aim of the PhD process is to train you to be a fully professional researcher - passing your PhD means that you know the state of the art in your area and the directions in which it could be extended, and that you have proved you are capable of making such extensions.

Where did your research-project come from? How did your research-questions emerge? You can't just say "my supervisor told me to do it" - if this is the case, you need to talk it over with your supervisor before the viva. Think out a succinct answer (2 to 5 minutes).

Has your view of your research topic changed during the course of the research?

You discuss future work in your conclusion chapter. How long would it take to implement X, and what are the likely problems you envisage? Do not underestimate the time and the difficulties - you might be talking about your own resubmission-order! ;-)

Particular Questions

Most of the viva will probably consist of questions about specific sections of your thesis, and the examiner should give a page-reference for each question. According to Alex Gray, these questions fall into six categories:

Clarification. The examiners ask you to explain a particular statement in the thesis. In some cases, their lack of understanding may be due to a typo, e.g. "Why did you connect the client to the sewer?" Also, "not" is a small word which makes a big difference! ;-)
Justification.
Alternatives considered. Be honest if you didn't consider alternatives, otherwise you'll be digging a hole for yourself.
Awareness of other work.
Distinction from similar work. Especially recent publications where others are working in the same area - what are the similarities and differences between your work and theirs?
Correction of errors (typos, technical errors, misleading statements, and so on).

Acknowledgements

Much of the material on this page comes from my supervisor Nick Filer, from CS700/CS710, from questions I've been asked at the end of various presentations I've given, and from my own viva (most of the questions there were thesis-specific). I added questions from the external websites given at the end of this document. I also updated this document in the light of Alex Gray's keynote speech, "Surviving the PhD Viva: An External Examiners Perspective" at the 2002 Research Students' Symposium.

If you can think of any viva-style questions that are not covered by the above, please do not hesitate to tell me, and I will consider them for inclusion on this page.

Finally, I found my own viva much less stressful than I thought it was going to be. The examiners know that it's an ordeal for anybody, so they should go out of their way to put you at your ease and make you feel comfortable. I was amazed how calm I was, even when I went back to hear the result. If you're worried about getting an `impossible' resubmission-order, remember it's not the examiners' job to set insurmountable hurdles - they want you to pass as soon as possible.

External links

PhD Vivas - the end is in sight? (Medical Sociology UK)
Preparing for the Viva Voce (University of London)
How to survive a thesis defence (Physics, University of New South Wales)
Preparation for the Oral Examination (Brunel University)
Procedure for Viva Examination (University College London)
How to survive your viva (Lancaster University)
PDF file: Preparing for Your PhD Viva Voce (Warwick Business School)

Tuesday 14 April 2009

Pointers to Defending a Thesis or Dissertation

How To Write a Thesis Statement

What is a Thesis Statement?

Why Should Your Essay Contain a Thesis Statement?

How Can You Write a Good Thesis Statement?

How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is Assigned.

How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is not Assigned.

How to Tell a Strong Thesis Statement from a Weak One.

1. A strong thesis statement takes some sort of stand.

2. A strong thesis statement justifies discussion.

3. A strong thesis statement expresses one main idea.

4. A strong thesis statement is specific.

Developing Your Thesis

A good thesis sentence will make a claim.

A good thesis sentences will control the entire argument.

A good thesis will provide a structure for your argument.

The Thesis Question

The Implied Thesis

A good thesis usually relies on a strong introduction, sharing the work.

The structure of your thesis, along with its introduction, should in some way reflect the logic that brought you to your argument.

A good working thesis is your best friend.

Revising the Working Thesis

Revising Your Thesis For Eloquence

Discovering Ideas Handbook

1.4 The Thesis Statement

1.4.1 What Is a Thesis Statement?

1.4.1.1 A single sentence.1.4.1.2 A declarative sentence.1.4.1.3 States what you want your readers to know, believe, or understand. 1.4.1.4 After having read your essay.

1.4.2 Why Write a Thesis Statement?

1.4.2.1 Why do you need to develop a thesis statement when you write an essay? 1.4.2.2 What's the value of writing out your thesis statement on a piece of paper? 1.4.2.3 Seeing the relationship between your thesis statement and your essay.

1.4.3 How to Write a Thesis Statement

1.4.3.1 Ask and answer the questions "why?" and "how?" of your trial thesis statement. 1.4.3.2 Make your thesis statement a positive statement, not a negative one. 1.4.3.3 Use the active voice in every clause in your thesis statement.

1.4.4 Content of Your Thesis Statement

1.4.4.1 Make it clear. 1.4.4.2 Make it precise and limited.1.4.4.3 Make it controversial or informative.1.4.4.4 Make it defensible.

1.4.1 What Is a Thesis Statement?

1.4.1.1 A thesis statement is a single sentence.

1.4.1.2 A thesis statement is a single declarative sentence.

1.4.1.3 A thesis statement is a single declarative sentence that states what you want your readers to know, believe, or understand.

1.4.1.4 A thesis statement is a single declarative sentence that states what you want your readers to know, believe, or understand after having read your essay.

1.4.2 Why Write a Thesis Statement?

1.4.2.1 Why do you need to develop a thesis statement when you write and essay?

1.4.2.2 What's the value of writing out your thesis statement on a piece of paper?

1.4.2.3 Seeing the relationship between your thesis statement and your essay.

1.4.3 How to Write a Thesis Statement

1.4.3.1 Ask and answer the questions "why?" and "how?" of your trial thesis statement.

1.4.3.2 Make your thesis statement a positive statement, not a negative one.

1.4.3.3 Use the active voice in every clause in your thesis statement.

1.4.4 Content of Your Thesis Statement

1.4.4.1 Make it clear and unambiguous.

1.4.4.2 Make it precise and limited.

1.4.4.3 Make it controversial or informative.

1.4.4.4 Make it defensible.

Checklist for Revising Thesis Statements

Friday 3 April 2009

Dr. Andrew BroadComputer ScienceCS710Nasty PhD Viva Questions

Preparing for the Viva: Before you submit

Preparing for the Viva: After you submit

The Viva itself

Typical Viva Questions

General Questions

Particular Questions

Acknowledgements

External links

Tools for Research

Labels

Blog Archive

1.4.1.1 A single sentence.
1.4.1.2 A declarative sentence.
1.4.1.3 States what you want your readers to know, believe, or understand.
1.4.1.4 After having read your essay.

1.4.2.1 Why do you need to develop a thesis statement when you write an essay?
1.4.2.2 What's the value of writing out your thesis statement on a piece of paper?
1.4.2.3 Seeing the relationship between your thesis statement and your essay.

1.4.3.1 Ask and answer the questions "why?" and "how?" of your trial thesis statement.
1.4.3.2 Make your thesis statement a positive statement, not a negative one.
1.4.3.3 Use the active voice in every clause in your thesis statement.

1.4.4.1 Make it clear.
1.4.4.2 Make it precise and limited.
1.4.4.3 Make it controversial or informative.
1.4.4.4 Make it defensible.

Dr. Andrew Broad
Computer Science
CS710
Nasty PhD Viva Questions