What's Is Your Thesis?

One of the trials of student life is constantly being asked to "compare and contrast." The topics one is asked to write about often have nothing in common, and the phrase itself is annoyingly redundant. A comparison, by definition, includes the drawing of contrast. It always amazed me that my teachers did not know the proper usage.

At its worst, education is but a child's slow uncovering of an endless number of frauds perpetrated against him by respectable and well-meaning adults. Religion is a big fraud, the literary genius of Thomas Pynchon is a small one, but the fraud I struggled hardest with throughout my school days was the set of rules I was taught about how to write an essay.

Through most of elementary school I was not called upon to write essays. Composition meant stories, and it was a pleasant task. We were given wide latitude to write however we pleased. Karim Shoukri, the naughty boy, wrote a different version of the same story each week. His stories always climaxed with a gruesome fight to the death between himself and an evil green slime monster named Mr. Townsend. Mr. Townsend was also the name of our English teacher, and when Karim was chosen to read his stories to the class he used to act out the battle scenes with gusto. Mr. Townsend played the straight man and never even cracked a smile.

I was not introduced to the horror of essays until sixth grade. I had to write a research paper about the state of Florida, and Mr. Ryan warned us that a mere recitation of facts would not be sufficient to earn a good grade. This warning confused me. I would have been happy to disregard the facts, but I sensed that I was not allowed to make things up either. What was there left to write about?

The answer to this question was provided by my 10th grade history teacher, Mr. Dilworth. He assigned me a 10-page term paper and he gave me my formal introduction to the academic rules of essay writing. I know the rules by heart because they were repeated to me, with minor variations, in nearly every class I ever took, right up to the day I left college. Simply put, the rules are as follows:

Every good essay must have a thesis and, like Gaul, a good essay is divided into three distinct parts. (1) An introduction, in which the thesis is briefly stated and a sketch of the argument is mapped out. (2) An argument, in which the thesis is restated and the supporting evidence presented. (3) A conclusion, in which the thesis is again restated and its significance discussed.

From the first moment Mr. Dilworth laid these rules out, my mind struggled in vain to understand them. I never fully grasped the difference between introduction, argument and conclusion because to me, they all sounded the same: (1) Say what you are going say. (2) Say what you are saying. (3) Say what you have just said.

I could not see why I should be required to repeat myself three times over and the supposedly distinct parts of the essay all got jumbled together in my head. I never learned how to write an introduction without throwing in all the evidence I was meant to save for my argument, and whenever I came up with a neat conclusion it always seemed that the proper place to put it was in the very first paragraph.

Another problem I had with the rules about essays was what you might call an ethical one. The rules seemed to require a certain dishonesty. An essay was meant to argue a single thesis, but it was my experience that the more I learned about a subject the less certain I felt about drawing any one conclusion. The world is not black and white, and soon after you discover that Florida is south of Georgia, you are bound to find out that it is also north of Brazil. How does one argue a thesis forcefully without covering up the evidence that runs counter to it? To present the counterevidence is to work against oneself. Not to present it, however, is misleading.

It is a well-established tenet of moral law that students always have the right to lie to their teachers, but it turned out that the freedom to lie didn't help me very much. I rarely had to grapple with the problem of how to argue a thesis because I could never come up with a thesis in the first place.

Getting back to 10th grade, the subject for my history term paper was German submarines in WWI. I read two books about submarines and I took copious notes on index cards, but I was stymied when I sat down to write because I was completely incapable of developing a thesis. Everything I thought of was either self-evident, demonstrably false or else far beyond my powers of proof.

Self-evident: Germany used submarines in WWI.

False: Submarines helped Germany win the war.

Unprovable: Germany would have lost the war six months earlier were it not for their submarines.

Still today I cannot think of a single meaningful thesis I could have chosen for my 10th grade paper about submarines. I don't think such a thesis exists. In the end I wrote six double-spaced pages about what German submarines looked like. Mr. Dilworth gave me a B- for my trouble and the comment, underlined in red: "What is your thesis?"

The problem of thesis development plagued me throughout my academic career. My 11th grade term paper was only two paragraphs long (I flunked it), and throughout four years of college I wrote very bad essays and agonized over my inability to write good ones. Only after many sleepless nights did it finally occur to me that perhaps I should abandon the rules of essay writing.

When I was 18 I began reading books for my own pleasure, and one of the startling things I noticed was that good writers don't seem to follow the rules. Herodotus wrote history simply by jotting down the facts and pointing out what he found interesting. Churchill wrote the same way and there is hardly a thesis in sight. Montaigne wrote essays not by arguing a single line but by stringing together a series of anecdotes that suggest lots of contradictory ideas all at once. And Plato is hopeless. He wrote weird little plays that begin with an unanswered question, ramble on for a while and then finish with the same question, still unanswered. At the end of the Euthyphro, Socrates sums it all up by saying: And so we must go back again, and start from the beginning to find out what holiness is. What sort of conclusion is that?

The more books I read, the more doubts I came to have about the rules I had been taught, and although the lessons of my reading took a long time to sink in, I am now convinced of one thing at least: my teachers were playing a nasty trick on me.

It is always a mistake to set oneself up as an expert on how to write. Good essays are written in a variety of styles so I am not going to propose any new set of rules. I simply wish to say that the rules I was taught about introduction, argument and conclusion are wrong. They are wrong because they encourage repetition whereas repetition is the death of readable prose. They are wrong because they encourage writers to fit their arguments to their conclusions whereas it should be the other way around. But the main reason they are wrong is because they are infinitely too narrow. The rules say that every essay must have a thesis, but that is only true of certain types of polemical essays.

As it happens, this essay is a polemic and it does have a thesis of sorts, but generally speaking, writers should be taught to avoid polemics. Polemics are tiresome and there is nothing worse than a writer who beats you over the head with his point of view. There are lots of readers who might be interested in a book about Virginia Woolf. There are very few readers who will be interested in a book that tries to prove Virginia Woolf killed herself because she was sexually molested as a child. The fact is, an essay does not need a thesis. It is far better to let the readers decide for themselves.

Concerning literary criticism, Joseph Conrad once said that it should "appeal to us with all the charm and wisdom of a well-told tale of personal experience." The same could be said about history or biography. The aim is to tell a story, not make an argument, and if I had it all to do over again, I would not have paid any attention to the rules Mr. Dilworth taught me in 10th grade. I would have titled my term paper: Some Interesting Things I Learned About Submarines. No doubt I would have received a B- and the comment, underlined in red, "What is your thesis?"