Presentation Topic: Defining Your Purpose and Thesis

1. Presentation Topic:Defining Your Purpose and Thesis Adapted and slightly modified from The Longman Handbook for Writers 2/e

2. � Addison Wesley Longman 1999 Analyzing your purpose What do you want your audience to do or know about your topic? Take action? Be informed? (To what end?) Change their opinions about something? (Why?) What other purposes might you have?

3. � Addison Wesley Longman 1999 Consider your topic as: A question of fact A question of definition A question of value A question of causality, or A question of consequence

4. � Addison Wesley Longman 1999 Consider your audience What are they likely to know already? What will they want or need to know? What kinds of evidence or support will they most likely respond to? Why should they listen to YOU?

5. � Addison Wesley Longman 1999 Use rhetorical purposes to guide your decision. �Now that you�ve analyzed the general purpose of a writing task or assignment, you can begin to consider more specific effects you want your writing to achieve. These effects are your rhetorical purposes for writing: what you want your writing to do at each stage.�

6. � Addison Wesley Longman 1999 Defining a main idea or thesis for your writing �Although you�ll hear the term thesis almost exclusively in college (with terms like main idea, message, or point being used more often in business and community writing), the principle of the thesis remains the same: a thesis is the controlling idea of a piece of writing.�

7. � Addison Wesley Longman 1999 Turn topics into theses � Vague Topic: computers in college � Still a Topic: lack of training � Still a Topic: students and training resources � Rough Thesis: an introductory college computing course should be required

8. � Addison Wesley Longman 1999 Expand your thesis with specifics Working Thesis: An introductory course should be required in the first year of a student�s career to ensure that he or she can maximize the appropriate use of computers for college work.

9. � Addison Wesley Longman 1999 Expand your thesis with specifics (cont�d.) Supporting Idea 1: Many students currently lack proper computer training to use college computing resources fully.

10. � Addison Wesley Longman 1999 Expand your thesis with specifics (cont�d.) Supporting 2: Students will benefit from a detailed introduction to hands-on computer training, including both hardware and popular software applications

11. � Addison Wesley Longman 1999 Expand your thesis with specifics (cont�d.) Supporting Idea 3: In-depth review of Internet resources will not only open the door to vast Internet resources, but also ensure the Internet is used appropriately by students.

12. � Addison Wesley Longman 1999 Modify your thesis as needed As you conduct research or explore your views on your topic in more depth, you will learn more about your topic and may change your thesis considerably. The purpose of research is not to find support for your thesis but to discover what your real thesis may be!

13. � Addison Wesley Longman 1999 Challenge List the most interesting questions or perspectives your topic generates (limit your responses to no more than one sentence each). Try to come up with at least 5 different questions/perspectives. Look for connections between the questions/perspectives you have listed. Could you choose ONE of these as the focus of your paper?