Thesis Tyranny

Just the other day our university Writing Center sponsored a "thesis workshop" for students.  This is, of course, a laudable move especially since a thesis is a feature in much assigned writing.  Organizing a piece of writing around some dominant idea makes a lot of sense.  What I find interesting, though, is that we never sponsor student workshops on how to come up with a good question.  After all, where do theses come from?  The answer, I'm afraid, is that they mostly come out of thin air.  A thesis is invented not because it answers an interesting question but because the writer needs a thesis, and needs one now.  This state of affairs  leads to a finding like the one reported by Project Information Literacy:  that nearly 60% of students in their large survey of student researchers try to come up with a thesis statement "early on."  I found a similar result in a survey I did of first-year writing students some years ago.  Cooking up a thesis is an easy way to solve the problem of having a thesis.

I worry that the relentless focus on the thesis in academic writing is one reason for this.  We should, of course, expect a thesis, or controlling idea, or whatever you want to call it but wouldn't it be useful to focus on where the thesis comes from?  In academic inquiry, a thesis emerges from discoveries that are seeded by questions.  But not just any questions.  We craft questions that will ultimately lead us towards judgments.  Knowing what kinds of questions do this--and will sustain the process of research--is at least as difficult as knowing what a good thesis statement looks like, and I'd argue that learning how to ask good questions is even more important.