WBE: Lesson 5: Choosing a Topic and Developing a Thesis

1. E S S O N Choosing a Topic and Developing a Thesis LESSON SUMMARY This lesson explains how to narrow your topic so that it is sufficiently focused. You’ll also learn how to develop a tentative thesis for your essay. 5 43 Rules of Thumb for Choosing a Topic The writing process involves making many decisions. You begin by deciding what to write about. To ensure that you make a good choice, follow these four rules. The topic you choose must: 1. be interesting to you and your audience 2. fulfill the writing assignment 3. be sufficiently focused 4. be able to be turned into a question Capturing Interest The first rule for choosing a topic is simple:Make certain it holds your interest. If it’s not interesting to you, why would it be to your reader? Your lack of enthusiasm will be evident, and your writing is likely to be dull, dry, and uninspired as a result. If you are interested in your topic, you can convey that feeling to your reader, no matter what the subject. Your reader will be drawn in by your lively prose and passionate assertions. But what if you aren’t really interested in any of the ideas you came up with while brainstorming? What if the assignment is about a subject you find dull? The challenge in this situation is to find some approach to the topic that does interest you. For example, your contemporary American politics teacher has asked you to write an essay about a healthcare policy issue—something you’ve never thought or cared much about. Your first brainstorming session resulted in a number of ideas, but nothing interesting enough to keep you writing for five pages. In that case, it makes sense to brainstorm again, using another method. Before you begin, make a short list of some of the things that do interest you. Even if they seem totally unrelated to the subject, you may be able to make a connection. For example, one student listed the following five areas of interest: • music • driving • snowboarding • Tom Clancy novels • the Internet She then saw several possible connections with her topic, even before brainstorming again. She could write about healthcare coverage for music therapy, healthcare policy resources on the Internet, or how accident statistics affect healthcare policies. WBE: Lesson 5: Choosing a Topic and Developing a Thesis • The topic you choose must: • 1. be interesting to you and your _____________ • 2. fulfill the _________________________ • 3. be sufficiently _______________ • 4. be able to be turned into a ______________

2. Finding a Focus • To write a successful essay, you need to focus your topic. In other words, you need to focus your material so it can be adequately covered within the confines of the essay. If you try to cover too much, you’ll have to briefly mention many subtopics, without delving into the “meat” of your topic. If your topic is too narrow, though, you’ll run out of ideas in a page or two, and probably fail to meet the requirements of your assignment. It may take time to sufficiently focus the topic. Here’s how one student narrowed it down:

3. Turning Your Topic into a Question • A thesis is the main idea of an essay, and is a response to a topic. In the previous example, the student narrowed her topic to “my generation’s beliefs about the balance between work and play.”To come up with a thesis, she can restate that topic in the form of a question: “What are my generation’s beliefs about the balance between work and play?” The answer to that question might be, _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ She might never use that sentence in her essay; she could reword it while writing, or after writing, a first draft. Nevertheless, this exercise gives her a point from which she can launch into writing. Here are two more examples of the evolution of a tentative thesis from an assignment, a focused topic, and a question.

6. When Assignments Ask Questions • Essay assignments that pose a question allow you to quickly formulate a thesis. In fact, they are often called “_____________” assignments for that reason. For example: Television is a powerful medium. What do you think is the ideal place of television in our lives, and why? Explain. How close is reality to that ideal? • Both questions are thesis bearing. Here is a student’s freewriting response: I think the ideal place of television is that it should be for information and entertainment, but that it shouldn’t be watched too much. The reality is far from the ideal because too many people spend too much time watching TV to the point that they don’t communicate with each other or do things that they should be doing to be physically and emotionally healthy (examples: exercise or homework). • This answer is a _______________________________. It explains how the student feels about the subject, it responds to the assignment, and it is focused.

7. Practice 1 • For the following assignment, identify a broad topic, narrow it, and turn it into a question and tentative thesis.

8. Practice 2 • Return to one of your brainstorming sheets from Lesson 3 or 4. Use the steps outlined in the four rules for choosing a topic, and write a tentative thesis