Worksheet 20: Thesis and Close Reading Review Exercises

A good thesis is:

1. Not obvious: Your thesis should require argumentation to make your reader believe you (I will sometimes refer to this as being “arguable”). If your thesis statement proposes something about the book that every reader of that book is likely to agree with, even without your having to make your case for it, then your thesis is not arguable; it is obvious, a statement of fact about the book rather than an interpretation of it. A reasonable reader should be able to disagree with your thesis—although it’s your job, of course, to try to convince them to agree.

Tip: A good way to test whether or not your thesis is arguable (not obvious) is to see whether you can write it as a sentence beginning with “Although.”

Eg: “Although we tend to identify love with gestures of affection and nurturing, Sing, Unburied, Sing suggests that sometimes the most powerful expressions of love for another involve doing something that is hard or maybe even hurtful to that person in the short term.”

2. Based on interpretation rather than opinion: Your thesis should seek to help the reader understand the text better by offering readings of what the text itself says. Your thesis should not be a report on what you personally found inspiring, objectionable, annoying, politically suspect, etc. about the book. Nor should your thesis propose to be making a claim about truth or reality as such (eg. “Sing, Unburied, Sing demonstrates that tough love is the best medicine”). Your thesis should limit itself to making a claim about what the book has to say.

3. Proportionate in scope to the length of the paper: Develop a thesis that you can reasonably hope to prove in the space allotted to you. A paper that offers a narrowly focused thesis which it can thoroughly explore within the page limit is usually much stronger than a paper that takes on a very ambitious thesis that it only has time to broadly, vaguely, or partially investigate.

4. Specific rather than very general: A good thesis will be broad enough to seem important (a too-specific thesis will seem trivial, eg. “The animal imagery in chapter 5 of Sing, Unburied, Sing is slightly different from the animal imagery in chapter 4”). However a good thesis will also be specific—will be phrased in such a way that the claim being made is not hazy but rather concrete. So for instance, compared to the thesis claim in the box above, this paraphrase is weaker because it is less specific: “Although we tend to think of love as kind, Sing, Unburied, Sing suggests that sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.” This thesis basically says the same thing as the one boxed above, but it’s made weaker by its reliance on an over-used cliché (“be cruel to be kind”) and its lack of specificity—notice how the boxed version says what this thesis says and more since the boxed one furthermore says that the expressions of love in which we seem to be hurting the person we love may even be the most powerful expressions of love there are in this book. So by being more specific, the boxed thesis is actually making saying more than the less specific thesis.

Thesis Exercise: Is It Arguable?

Please read through the following theses interpreting the excerpted passage. For each one, please indicate whether you think that thesis is arguable (as defined in paragraph #1 above). Be prepared to defend your assessment in discussion section.

Passage to close read (p. 118):

I lay there until I can’t no more, and then I carry Kayla into the bathroom and stick my finger down her throat and make her throw up. She fights me, hitting at my arms, crying against my hand, sobbing but not making no words, but I do it three times, make her vomit over my hand, hot as her little body, three times, all of it red and smelling sweet, until I’m crying and she’s shrieking…. All the while, my heart beating so hard I can hear it in my ears, because I knew what Kayla was saying. I knew.

I love you Jojo. Why you make me, Jojo? Jojo! Brother! Brother.

Thesis #1:

In this passage, Ward describes how emotionally difficult it is for Jojo to make Kayla vomit up Leonie’s potion.

Thesis #2:

In this passage, although Kayla doesn’t understand it, Jojo is in fact attempting to take care of her.

Thesis #3:

In this passage, Ward uses descriptive language and imagery to depict Jojo’s efforts to take care of Kayla even though she protests.

Thesis #4:

In this passage, the stark contrast between the violence of Jojo’s actions and the care he is expressing for her through them highlights the power of his love for his sister—that he is willing even to risk losing the comfort of her affection for him in order to take care of her.

Thesis #5:

In this passage, Ward dangerously suggests that love sometimes hurts—an idea that can provide cover for abusive partners and excuses for why the loved ones they abuse should forgive them.

A good close reading will:

1. Quote from the text. When reading a poem or short story, your argument should derive largely if not exclusively from close readings of the language of the text. However, when analyzing a whole novel, some parts of an analysis should certainly be based upon close reading the language of the text, but other parts may be based upon analyzing how certain plot points develop a given theme. This is to say that when writing about a whole novel, you may find that some of your paragraphs don’t do close reading, but at least some of them absolutely should involve close reading and when you are doing close reading you must quote from the text.

2. Analyze the quoted text (i.e. don’t quote and run). While you must quote the text in order to do a close reading of the text, simply including quotations in your analysis is not itself tantamount to close reading the text. The point of close reading is to help us to notice something about the quoted text that we might not have noticed simply by reading it. So if you just provide a quotation but don’t offer analysis of that quotation, then you’re not actually close reading.

3. Provide not just interpretations of quotations, but analysis that explains why the quotation supports your interpretation of it (i.e. don’t ask us to “just trust me on this”). If you provide a quotation in one sentence and then follow that with a sentence which says something like, “This shows that….[interpretive claim],” there’s a good chance that your interpretation, while perhaps correct, won’t be very persuasive. This is because what you’re doing is providing a quote and then telling us what that quote means, without telling us why you’ve decided that this is what the quote means. So you’re effectively telling us, “just trust me on this.” The way to make your interpretive close reading persuasive is to write it in a way that explains how you’ve arrived at your conclusion, and the easiest way to do this is usually to zero in on a particular word or image in the quotation, and to unpack the connotations of that word or image.

Close Reading Exercise: Fixcing the “Just Trust Me On This” Problem

Please read through both of the following analyses. The first one offers an interpretation of a quote that is unsupported by close reading (i.e. has the “just trust me on this” problem). The second one offers an interpretation that is supported by close reading of the quote. When you’re done reading please complete the questions at the end.

Paragraph A: unsupported interpretation (“just trust me on this”):

Ward shows us that a real test of love may be that we’re willing to risk losing the comfort of another person’s affection for us in order to protect them. “She fights me, hitting at my arms, crying against my hand, sobbing but not making no words.” This scene shows us how much Jojo loves Kayla because he’s willing to suffer through her anger and sense of betrayal in order to take care of her by ensuring she doesn’t get poisoned.

Paragraph B: interpretation supported by close reading:

Ward shows us that a real test of love may be that we’re willing to risk losing the comfort of another person’s affection for us in order to protect them. All through the book we’ve seen Jojo and Kayla nuzzle each other, sing to each other, rub each other’s backs, and yet here Kayla “fights” Jojo, “hitting” him as she’s “sobbing” and “shrieking” for him to stop. It’s a violent scene, and we can tell the emotional toll it takes on Jojo because he feels his “heart beating so hard,” and because he can hear Kayla’s thoughts, which express her uncomprehending sense of betrayal. The physical violence and emotional hardship that Jojo endures in this scene show us how much he loves Kayla, that he’s willing to suffer through her anger and sense of betrayal in order to take care of her by ensuring she doesn’t get poisoned.

Please note, the second example here is stronger not because its simply longer, but because what happens in those extra sentences is the close reading. Those middle sentences, analyzing the quoted words, help the reader to understand why the interpretation (same across both examples) is justified. To get a sense of how those sentences provide support, please answer the following questions.

1. Both analyses claim that Jojo suffers through Kayla’s anger at him. Where (if anywhere) does paragraph A support this claim through close reading? Where (if anywhere) does paragraph B support this claim through close reading?

2. Both analyses claim that Jojo suffers through Kayla’s sense of betrayal. Where (if anywhere) does paragraph A support this claim through close reading? Where (if anywhere) does paragraph B support this claim through close reading?