Chapter 4: From Thesis to Essay
Editing the Three-Storey Thesis
As we discussed in our previous chapter, spending the time revising your thesis statement is as crucial as writing your initial draft. The basic components of your thesis include:
- An identification of the possible intended audience of the article being analyzed,
- The specific focused portion(s) of the text you’ve chosen to analyze,
- The best pieces of evidence from that specific portion(s) of the text,
- A proposed analysis of the author’s complex argument.
As you review the three-storey thesis you wrote at the end of Chapter 3, keep these components in mind and evaluate each piece of the argument separately. Once you have isolated and evaluated each of the components separately, then re-read your thesis to consider how well they fit together. Do not try to do everything at once. Rather, give yourself individual tasks for each revision pass and stay granular in your approach.
In this particular stage of revision, pay special attention to the third storey that we added at the end of Chapter 3, keeping in mind these specific questions:
- Is the author arguing that something must be done? Why?
- Is the author offering a solution to a problem raised earlier in the text?
- Is the author warning of specific further consequences that will arise from a problem raised earlier in the text?
- What does the author want their reader to leave the text thinking and/or doing?
Before you do the self-evaluation below, re-read your thesis and label each of your three storeys clearly in the margins. You want to see plainly which sentences and thoughts belong to which part of your argument. Now that you have read and re-read your three-storey thesis, let’s do another self-evaluation.