Okay. So. I have thoughts on thesis statements and research questions.
Some readers may know and some may not, but I graduated with a bachelor's degree two years ago. That degree was in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and my coursework shows it. Some readers may also be familiar with my undergraduate thesis, available elsewhere on the blog, that is most definitely not in engineering.
That paper represents the sum of my knowledge of medieval Irish garments at the time when it was written. It was also completed around 3:00 in the morning just before I mailed it out to my thesis advisor in September of 2014 after I had gone to a beer festival. That isn't really relevant to this post, but I recently re-read it and I feel the need to defend some of my grammatical, logical, and "spelling" choices. I had my boyfriend proofread it in the hope that he would catch errors that I had missed, but alas.
I've been reading a series of essays comprising a book called "Anglo-Saxon England: Norse-English Relations in the Period before the Conquest." I finished it today and one of the things I took away from it was this: a scholarly paper has to have a thesis statement because it has to have a point. What it does not have to have is completely new information to add to the field. That was one of the things I missed in my thesis: I knew that the point was to add to my chosen field, but I had always been taught that I needed to set out a question, then defend it. That was how papers were written in school: make an assertion and defend. Assert and defend, assert and defend, all through grade school and into college. When I wrote a historiography in my junior year of high school (one year before secondary graduation, for those not familiar), we were assigned the introduction first, or rather the approach we would take. We had a couple days between when we chose our topic to when we wrote our introduction, during which we weren't expected to do in-depth research on our topic. We decided on our methods of presentation before we knew much of anything about the material that was available on our subject and what it might provide for us.
Here's what I wish our assignments had been:
1. Decide on a topic
2. Present a body of evidence
3. Write a research question
4. Present a rough draft of evidence and a refined research question
5. Present a conclusion and a finalized research question
6. Present an introduction, thesis statement, and a second rough draft of evidence
7. Present final paper
The idea behind this process is that unless a full experiment has been conducted as in a scientific study, the researcher will continue to refine their understanding of the topic as their writing progresses. Reading, reshuffling, and rewriting are all part of the investigative writing process as I understand it now, and the idea of what kinds of questions can be covered in a given format is enhanced as writing progresses. Had I really understood that coming out of high school, I may have approached my Honors thesis in a much more scientific way. I had the knowledge of what a "good" paper might look like and I had been writing thesis statements and defending them since they taught us how to write an essay back in third grade. I was considered a very good essay writer, but all I was doing was writing to the same format that I had been taught, and I could find evidence to support almost any claim that I thought to be true. I even wrote a thesis using a similar strategy in high school. I may post it sometimes, if I can bring myself to do it - it's an exercise in "Dear Reader, I have a big topic to cover and I'm supposed to prove something. Sincerely, Me."
When I approached my thesis, I was already late to the party. I hadn't even entered the Honors college until my second year, and finding a thesis advisor on an Ag/Engineering campus that had both the time and the background to advise a thesis on medieval history took the better part of six months. In a stroke of (I think) genius I turned to the Apparel Design (i.e. fashion) college to focus on fashion instead of history or archaeology, since the history department was busy and half of the archaeology department was on sabbatical. So I found my advisor with one and a half, possibly two years out of the usual four to write my thesis. Then, I had to have a research question/thesis statement on file with the Honors college before I had had time to really dive into research. The college made it clear to us that the question on file did not have to be the question I actually answered or approached in my paper, but I thought that meant that I was allowed to change topics. After years of training in "Assert, Defend" I was darn well going to Assert, and then Defend.
All through my research process I had a goal of answering my question. I did eventually change my question to be more specific (remember, thesis statements have to be narrow and concise!) but the general idea remained the same: what did Irish women wear in medieval times? This was the question I had set out to answer, and that was the question I would explore, even if there was no answer just yet. Even if answering that question properly would take a lifetime of study and at least one book's worth of analysis and argument.
What I realized today, or perhaps I only think I realized it, is that the point of a scholarly article can and maybe should be the presentation of evidence. It should be to a particular end and it should make a point, but the paper's purpose can be to simply present evidence and not necessarily to persuade an audience to the author's point of view. Maybe all I needed to do in a paper was summarize what I had discovered about something without an end in mind. In other words, "Here's a thing I found. Look at the thing! Also, I think it does *this* but it might not be for that."
Everything I remember learning about paper writing in school focused on the question, or the assertion: "This is what I think." What I wish I had been taught, or what I wish I had focused on if it actually was taught, is the process and the evidence. I wish the message I had remembered was "I don't care what you think. What did you find out?"
I know that there are a lot of people out there who have been officially taught, as their degree or field of study, how to write a paper that presents evidence. What have you discovered?
