Chapter 1: Time is on Your Side

Thinking Ahead…

Hand-drawn mindmap in many colours, pointing to central box
Get ready to organize your thoughts on the text. From Pixabay/CC0 1.0
Compare the paragraph you just wrote to your earlier essay on Charles Justice’s “The Ultimate Communications App.” You will likely see the improvement that gathering focused pieces of evidence brings to analyzing the author’s complex argument. Now that you are comfortable with information gathering and crafting an observational paragraph, we are going to take the next step toward focusing that information into a purposeful thesis.

When you revise an observational paragraph into your unique and controversial reading of a text, you will need to capture the original text’s main argument  and highlight the article’s main points (including any key concepts or theories) while eliminating all extraneous or minor details. Review the observational paragraph you wrote and consider how you might revise it into a purposeful thesis that analyzes the author’s complex argument.

In the next chapter we will be working on revising your observational paragraph into a 2 storey thesis statement. By this we mean that you want to do a little more than summarize or simply restate what is in the text. You want your readers to understand right away that this is your reading of the text that follows from the evidence within the text that you have chosen. You are not summarizing, rather you are persuading your readers to see what they can learn about a text by reading it your way.

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Write Here, Right Now: An Interactive Introduction to Academic Writing and Research Copyright © 2018 by Ryerson University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.