Blogging Pedagogy

This semester, I'm teaching an introductory literature course entitled Women's Popular Genres, aimed primarily at students who intend to major in English. Perhaps because of the content of the class -- two words: Jane Austen -- it has also attracted students from other majors who want to read and talk about the works. Some students feel very comfortable with the process of writing about literature, while others who work primarily in a different discipline find it more of a stretch.

In this first half of the course, they write three short papers (2-4 pp.) analyzing some element of a work we've read. These papers are intended to help the students learn to construct short, specific analytical arguments about literary works. This requires them to construct strong and narrowly focused thesis statements.

I wanted to create a thesis-building worksheet for my students: a simple step-by-step process that would offer students who are new to making literary arguments a structure upon which they could model their own theses. As I Googled around a bit, I discovered that it's tough to find good examples of this sort of thing -- every college writing center has a webpage or a PDF handout with plenty of explanatory text about creating thesis statements, but very few present more linear instructions. I ended up producing my own handout, which I'm attaching to this post, in case anyone's interested. I also found a number of useful primers on developing a thesis.

For literature classes, the neatest is Dartmouth's page on thesis development, which not only includes this handy checklist:

• 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?

... but also an excellent walkthrough of the process of developing a thesis based on specific literary evidence, under the section entitled "Constructing a thesis: a writer's clinic for beginners." Highly recommended.

Other sites I referred to when constructing the worksheet include the Harvard writing center's page about theses and, of course, UT's Undergraduate Writing Center, which has a nice handout on thesis development as well.