12/29/2023 0 Comments Easy thesis generatorToday men are more and more conscious of maleness not as a fact but as a problem. And by mid-century, the male role had plainly lost its rugged clarity of outline. But one begins to detect a new theme emerging in some of these authors, especially in Hemingway: the theme of the male hero increasingly preoccupied with proving his virility to himself. Even well into the twentieth century, the heroes of Dreiser, of Fitzgerald, of Hemingway remain men. The frontiersmen of James Fenimore Cooper, for example, never had any concern about masculinity they were men, and it did not occur to them to think twice about it. What has happened to the American male? For a long time, he seemed utterly confident in his manhood, sure of his masculine role in society, easy and definite in his sense of sexual identity. Notice how everything drives the reader toward the last sentence and how that last sentence clearly signals what the rest of this essay is going to do. Here is the first paragraph of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s essay The Crisis of American Masculinity. It more frequently appears at or near the end of the first paragraph or two. It can be the first sentence of an essay, but that often feels like a simplistic, unexciting beginning. The thesis statement usually appears near the beginning of a paper. If the thesis statement is something that we needed prior approval for, changing it might require the permission of the instructor or thesis committee, but it is better to seek such permission than to write a paper that tries to do too much or that claims to do less than it actually accomplishes. On the other hand, if we discover that our paper has done adequate work but the thesis statement appears to include things that we haven't actually addressed, then we need to limit that thesis statement. If we discover new information in the process of writing our paper that ought to be included in the thesis statement, then we'll have to rewrite our thesis statement. It ought to be one of the last things that we fuss with in the rewriting process. The thesis statement should remain flexible until the paper is actually finished. It's not a matter of being lazy it's a matter of limiting our discussion to the work that can be accomplished within a certain number of pages. To back up such a thesis statement would require a good deal of work, however, and we might be better off if we limited the discussion to an example of how two particular community colleges tend to work in conflict with each other. What if we wrote about the problem of community colleges in Connecticut being so close together geographically that they tend to duplicate programs unnecessarily and impinge on each other's turf? Now we have a focus that we can probably write about in a few pages (although more, certainly, could be said) and it would have a good argumentative edge to it. Now we're narrowing down to something useful, but once we start writing such a paper, we would find that we're leaving out so much information, so many ideas that even most casual brainstorming would produce, that we're not accomplishing much. Can we write a paper about problems within the community college system in Connecticut. dissertation, but certainly not in a paper meant for a Composition course. Can we write a good paper about problems in higher education in Connecticut? Well, we're getting there, but that's still an awfully big topic, something we might be able to handle in a book or a Ph.D. Can we write a good paper about problems in higher education in the United States? At best, such a paper would be vague and scattered in its approach. The principle to remember is that when you try to do too much, you end up doing less or nothing at all. The thesis statement is also a good test for the scope of your intent. Many writers think of a thesis statement as an umbrella: everything that you carry along in your essay has to fit under this umbrella, and if you try to take on packages that don't fit, you will either have to get a bigger umbrella or something's going to get wet. Although it is certainly possible to write a good essay without a thesis statement (many narrative essays, for example, contain only an implied thesis statement), the lack of a thesis statement may well be a symptom of an essay beset by a lack of focus. The thesis statement is that sentence or two in your text that contains the focus of your essay and tells your reader what the essay is going to be about.
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