Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students, reading as a thesis.3/29/2017 An effective thesis cannot be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." A thesis is not a topic; nor is it a fact; nor is it an opinion. "Reasons for the fall of communism" is a topic. "Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe" is a fact known by educated people. "The fall of communism is the best thing that ever happened in Europe" is an opinion. (Superlatives like "the best" almost always lead to trouble. It's impossible to weigh every "thing" that ever happened in Europe. And what about the fall of Hitler? Couldn't that be "the best thing"?) While Dukakis' "soft-on-crime" image hurt his chances in the 1988 election, his failure to campaign vigorously after the Democratic National Convention bore a greater responsibility for his defeat. Steps in Constructing a Thesis Anticipate the counterarguments. Once you have a working thesis, you should think about what might be said against it. This will help you to refine your thesis, and it will also make you think of the arguments that you'll need to refute later on in your essay. (Every argument has a counterargument. If yours doesn't, then it's not an argument—it may be a fact, or an opinion, but it is not an argument.) A thesis should never be vague, combative or confrontational. An ineffective thesis would be, "Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe because communism is evil." This is hard to argue (evil from whose perspective? what does evil mean?) and it is likely to mark you as moralistic and judgmental rather than rational and thorough. It also may spark a defensive reaction from readers sympathetic to communism. If readers strongly disagree with you right off the bat, they may stop reading. This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/). When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice at bottom. To write your thesis statement, all you have to do is turn the question and answer around. You've already given the answer, now just put it in a sentence (or a couple of sentences) so that the thesis of your paper is clear. Contributors: Purdue OWL Staff Pitfalls: In his novel, The Secret Agent. Conrad uses beast and cannibal imagery to describe the characters and their relationships to each other. This pattern of images suggests that Conrad saw corruption in every level of early twentieth-century London society. So @indecisionpersonified – I hope these tips help you make the most out of the next six months. Do you have tricks to share which make your reading more effective and efficient? How did you prepare yourself (or not) for the PhD reading marathon? Love to hear from you in the comments. In addition, I wish I had solidified a few skills and some nuanced knowledge about how to carry/conduct myself. Most people argue with me and say, “Oh, but Z abstracts for research paper, you gain those skills during the PROCESS.” Perhaps. But I at least wish I had already learned of what the best books about graduate-level reading and graduate-level writing are, and I wish I had familiarized myself with them. It ends up that books such as Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates (Wallace and Wray), Demystifying Dissertation Writing (Single), The Unwritten Rules of Phd Research (Petre and Rugg) business letters for job application, Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day (Bolker) problem based learning case studies experience and practice, The Sense of Structure (Gopen), Foundations of Social Research (Crotty), Mistakes that Social Scientists Make (Seltzer), and A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Seventh Edition (Turbian, et al.). Well, for me it would have been GREAT to have been provided their titles on a reading list, or perhaps better said, a SKIMMING or FAMILIARIZING list. ? “… I have just moved continents and been accepted into a PhD program and have six free months before I start. I was wondering whether you had any advice to give people like me on how best to use the time before starting a PhD in order to be prepared for a PhD!” A good tool for analysing citations is ‘Publish or Perish’. Publish or Perish was designed and built by the University of Melbourne Scholar Ann-Wil Harzing and uses Google scholar to perform the analysis (note: if you are on a Mac like me you will need to have some kind of windows emulator). To find out more about how Publish or Perish works, have a look at Harzing’s white paper here or download a PDF sample of the ebook . (2) In Retrospect, What I Wish I’d Been Doing the 6 Months before I Commenced My Research Degree Program 2. Research design leading to a research question. Understand the process of designing your research. I’m sure you’ll have courses on this but it’s better to start thinking about it now because the research question guides just about every aspect of your PhD. The resaerch question is like your guiding light in darkness. If it’s dim or you don’t have one example of a cover letter, you will wander around blindly. This can cause a lot of anxiety. Getting comfortable with the process takes some time so ease yourself into it. Well, I’ve gone on too long. I am just VERY passionate about not having people suffer needlessly, lost, like I did (LOL!). Awesome conversation. Please excuse all typos all essay about cloning, and blessings! HSH, I’ll have to stick “Authoring a PhD” in my reading wishlist! Thanks! At most universities the PhD application process asks you to hand in a draft research proposal of around 5000 words. So it’s not the initial thoughts which we should concentrate on here, but how to develop those thoughts through focussed reading and note taking. I was FLOORED when I dragged-and-dropped all of the PDFs from my Windows folders on my laptop into Mendeley and the count read 600+. No wonder I was drowning in the literature. SMH. I would spend the time preparing a manuscript for publication. I began my PhD not having any publications, as I did not publish anything from my Master’s thesis. I quickly realized that the only way I would be competitive for any type of grants or scholarships would be to publish something–and fast. You do not need to have data–you can write a theoretical paper if need be. I am not saying to publish just for the sake of publishing scope of project, but it would be an excellent opportunity to begin honing your writing skills and preparing an academic manuscript. All the advice to start note-taking early and to keep it organised from the get go is tremendously useful. Scivener, endnote, zotero and mendeley are all terms I learned from this blog and am now experimenting to see which one or a combination will suit me best. I have a weakness for those TV reality shows like Mary, Queen of Shops and What not to Wear where fashion experts help clueless punters build ‘capsule collections’ by making them sort through mountains of unflattering clothes (with many tears in the process). Totally vibing with you 100%, HSH, and I love, love, love point 3 that you make above. Paradigm-shifting, to think of the lit review as 2. And VERY, VERY helpful and important (wish I’d heard that 5 years ago! LOL!) Great post, protoscholar! I think Google Docs would be a good opntpourity, but I’ve seen a lot more businesses lately just using Office + Dropbox instead for doc sharing & editing.A few points: Mendeley is the correct spelling. The link to Mendelay is probably sending your readers somewhere they really don’t want to go.The database import functions of Zotero and Mendeley are represented in the read column, under the import item.Again, grwat post and if you have any follow-up questions about Mendeley I’m happy to help. A word search is the best tool for finding the ‘meaty’ parts of a paper or a book, without getting too invested in it. Try searching for ‘sign post’ language such as: “This paper argues that”, “In this paper we explore” or “the main question is”. Look for certain verbs as well, such as shown, proven, suggest, question, query and challenge. Another trick is to look for words that modify arguments such as: may, might, possibly and so on. Certain words will be important to your work, so keep a ledger of the ones that appear in papers that you find useful. Word freaks me out. I don’t use it as much as I used to, I have even come to substitute it for other tasks with google drive (as this one also stimulates writing as a process) Thank you all for helping me try and effectively utilise my time before i start my ‘reading marathon’ and yes. I’ll take the advice to rest and have fun very seriously too! ? Coincidentally, I was just reading an old thread in the Chronicle forum on what to do before the PhD starts proper: I so love your blog. It has this calming effect on me when I’m freaking out. Thank you so much for sharing all these tricks, analysis, reflections and hacking methods with a broader public. (reading from a Caribbean island far far away from Australia). Citavi and Scrivener work really well together, and Citavi is TAILOR-MADE for academic note-taking and analytic memo-making and the like. That was the design/intent. The beautiful thing is how Citavi makes citations and bibliography generation a BREEZE. The trick with Citavi, I’ve found, is to name and “populate” your Citavi files appropriately. I have different categories of Citavi files that I tag via a naming system: “[ARTICLE – Auth -Year] Article Short Title,” for example, so that I instantly know that THAT Citavi file will only contain my notes on that article. I also have a file entitled “[PROJECT] Master’s Thesis,” for example. 3. Lit review. I think there are actually 2 lit reviews when you do a PhD. The first is an informal one to get an idea of the lay of the land. You basically read around the general area you think you’d like to work on so that you have something to start the research process with. The second lit review is the more structured one that goes into your PhD. It must be directed by a research question and you read for this lit review with specific purposes in mind. You don’t have to worry about this yet. I find there’s a tendency to conflate the two processes and this can be problematic. Always make sure how you review the literature is fit for purpose. I began my Ed.D program in 2010 and I will begin my dissertation in the fall and hopefully graduate in 2015. The best advice I can give is relax and enjoy life for 6 months. You will have plenty of time to read and have no life at all unfortunately. When you are in you program this is what I have to offer: When you find a really good article that you want to use for a paper, go to the references in that article and read those. It is called snowballing (i think) and it is allowed. Also, when you look at other dissertations for research tips on creative essay writing, look at the table of contents to see if it has what you need need help writing, and then if you find a good dissertation do the same thing as I said with the article, go to the references. it is a good way to find other articles. I am exhausted and cannot wait to finish. Good Luck to you! If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt, ask your instructor if the assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze, to interpret, to compare and contrast states essays, to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout on understanding assignments for more information.) Suppose you are taking a course on 19th-century America, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment: Compare and contrast the reasons why the North and South fought the Civil War. You turn on the computer and type out the following: Now you have a working thesis! Included in this working thesis is a reason for the war and some idea of how the two sides disagreed over this reason. As you write the essay, you will probably begin to characterize these differences more precisely, and your working thesis may start to seem too vague. Maybe you decide that both sides fought for moral reasons, and that they just focused on different moral issues. You end up revising the working thesis into a final thesis that really captures the argument in your paper: Compare this to the original weak thesis. This final thesis presents a way of interpreting evidence that illuminates the significance of the question. Keep in mind that this is one of many possible interpretations of the Civil War—it is not the one and only right answer to the question. There isn’t one right answer; there are only strong and weak thesis statements and strong and weak uses of evidence. A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a “working thesis” that presents a basic or main idea and an argument that you think you can support with evidence. Both the argument and your thesis are likely to need adjustment along the way. Let’s look at another example. Suppose your literature professor hands out the following assignment in a class on the American novel: Write an analysis of some aspect of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. “This will be easy,” you think. “I loved Huckleberry Finn !” You grab a pad of paper and write:
While both Northerners and Southerners believed they fought against tyranny and oppression, Northerners focused on the oppression of slaves while Southerners defended their own right to self-government. By the end of the finishing a thesis session, participants should be able to: These sentences, when placed together, could constitute a thesis paragraph. Notice three things about this paragraph: What about theses in essay exams? In an essay exam, the thesis is the one-sentence answer to the question posed; the remainder of the paper will prove the thesis. How do I develop a good thesis? Here is an example of how you might arrive at a strong thesis. More suggestions for developing a good thesis: Developing a good thesis is usually the most difficult part of writing a paper; do not expect it to come easily. Constructing a tentative thesis (hypothesis): Here is a somewhat formulaic approach to constructing a tentative thesis. It is just one possibility among many. What is the thing that happened? Succinctly introduce the event which frames your paper. Finally purchased a custom essay, you will have to link the new ideas of race to the rise of disfranchisement laws. You may be able to do this within the last two sections of the argument; if not it thesis proposal sample, it will be necessary here. Introduce the historical dilemma: why the gap between the end of Reconstruction and the start of disfranchisement. A brief summary of the historical debate would help here. (2) The main clause. This is the heart of your argument -- the thing you will prove. The subject of the main clause should be the subject of the paper. Do not present it in the form of "I will show" or "I hope to prove." The evolution trial of 1925 was made a farce and a comedy by the circumstances surrounding the trial. Behind this facade lay issues that were deeply disturbing to the Americans of the 1920s. By an examination of the Scopes Trial, some of these issues can begin to be perceived and analyzed and perhaps they can reveal a better understanding of the decade. (There is no thesis here. The last sentence seems to be a thesis, but actually speaks to the way the paper will proceed rather than to its conclusion. It does not explain why or how something happened.) (2) These sentences not only perform the functions described in the questions, they introduce and explain key dates and terms (disfranchisement, Reconstruction, economic crisis, 1890s, etc.) The thesis is a scholarly argument. Most writing attempts to convince the reader of something. Even a poetic description of a rock is an attempt to convince the reader that the rock appears a certain way. A history paper takes a stand on a historical issue or problem, and attempts to develop a coherent and persuasive line of thought intended to convince the reader of the validity of that stand. Your thesis is the concise statement of your argument. The thesis paragraph (See also the handout entitled "The Three Parts of a History Paper."): The first paragraph of your paper should be your thesis paragraph. The function of this paragraph is to define the problem your paper addresses, define key words and concepts you will use, and present your argument in summary. A thesis paragraph is not an opportunity to meditate on the history of the world; you do not have enough space in a thesis paragraph to do anything more than fulfill the purposes stated above. The last sentence of this paragraph should be your thesis. Here is an exercise which may help you develop your thesis paragraph. Answer the following questions: (3) A "because" clause. This will force you to summarize support for your thesis as concisely as possible. (4) Develop a new, more complex hypothesis by modifying the old one. There usually is no need to start from scratch; simply alter what you started with. Discuss how economic downturn helped create a new situation in which new racial ideas could emerge. This is the first part of your thesis. It will require evidence of an economic downturn, and relate that downturn to new ideas of race. What does a bad thesis look like? Here are some examples.
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