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Temporary thesis writing

After you have found a general subject and have read a general article for background, you must next decide how you will work with the research topic you have chosen. You might, for example, have selected several authors as the subject of your paper. You will have access to books and articles that deal with facts about their personal lives, their work, their environment, the influences on their lives and work, and the significance of their influence on others.

Certainly, there would be no value in simply restating the facts and opinions as you have read them; you could not retell them all, and you would have no criterion for deciding how to select those that you would retell. Consequently, you will have to decide to concentrate on some point that your preliminary reading has suggested is an arguable truth about your topic and that further reading would probably substantiate and clarify. Just as the creative artist is led to make a final statement of truth about some aspect of life by observing and selecting from the myriad details of life’s experiences, so you, as a researcher, must be able to crystallize a statement of truth by observing and selecting significant details from the wealth of material you will find on your topic. This truth, stated in a simple sentence, provides you with temporary thesis writing. It is a statement of your opinion, a conclusion that, from what you have read, you have reason to believe can be proven, but that you are scholar enough to discard or alter later if you uncover facts that prove it invalid. Good thesis writing is never the statement of a preconceived notion or a personal prejudice that you could prove only by distorting or ignoring facts, nor is it the statement of any indisputable fact about which further investigation would reveal nothing. It must express an idea that is arguable or debatable or one that demands further explanation. Because it is an idea, it must be expressed as a full sentence, never just a phrase. “Mythology as art” is a subject, not a thesis writing. “A culture often expresses its mythology both visually and verbally” is acceptable thesis writing. As a thesis writing, it requires further explanation and research because it is not self-explanatory.

If, for example, you wanted to do your research on some area of mythology, you might find in the course of your reading that you are surprised to learn that the Greeks portrayed even their most important gods and goddesses, such as Zeus and his wife Hera, as people like themselves who, although powerful and immortal, had many human frailties. The almighty Zeus, for example, was often guilty of thievery and promiscuity, as well as trickery to hide his many infidelities from his wife. Your discovery would not. However, justify a thesis writing that states that most Greek myths are just stories that show how evil the major gods are. Such a thesis would be based on a preconceived notion showing the limitations of your own understanding of the complexity of the subject. Neither would you consider a thesis statement saying that many early societies developed their own mythologies about the lives of the gods because this is an indisputable fact and there is very little to argue with or prove. However, because you might have realized from reading further that each culture differs dramatically in the way it thinks about the nature of its gods, you might consider an investigation of the similarities and differences in the ways that two, or possibly even three, different cultures look at their gods or how they conceptualize the relationship of mankind to the gods they have created.

Or perhaps as a result of reading in a general article that there are many similarities between African creation myths, which tell how the world and mankind came into being, and myths concerning death and the mystery surrounding death, you might be challenged to investigate the relationship between the creation and fertility myths and myths about death in the mythology of the Korumba people of Africa.

On the other hand, you might have been alerted by a statement in a general article that explains how a particular Mexican mask is used in a ritual that “acts out” the story of a myth about the Aztec god Quet-zalcoatl. You might decide to show how the details of the myth are translated into the specific actions of a ritual. Or you might be interested in finding out how and why certain rituals are practiced in some areas of Mexico and absent from others. In other words, you will choose one aspect of what you have read and investigate it to ascertain its validity.

Or after attending an exhibition of ancient Egyptian art and reading the catalog from it, you might realize how valuable it would be to know something about Egyptian mythology; you might even wonder whether there is a strong relationship between the art you saw at the museum and the Egyptian myths you find in your library. That question could challenge you to formulate a thesis that involves a study of the relationship of art and mythology in ancient Egypt or in another early culture that you would like to investigate. However, you would see very quickly that, because of the innumerable perspectives from which art and mythology can be compared, there are too many possibilities for development in one paper. Therefore, you might scan general articles covering various aspects of Egyptian mythology as well as of Egyptian art to find out whether there is some concept common to both that could form the basis of a comparative study of the two. You might find, for example, that Egyptian creation myths are the subjects of much of the art that attempts to express visually the mythology of “the beginning.” A comparative study of the two modes of expression would now give you a basis upon which to narrow and reformulate your temporary thesis writing.

Although the thesis that you develop now is necessarily a temporary one because you have not accumulated all the available facts yet, it does provide you with an angle of vision from which you can continue your research. You now know how you are going to focus on your subject, and you are ready to formulate a temporary outline. As you search in your reading and note-taking for the answers to the challenging question suggested by your thesis, you will, of course, reevaluate your facts and modify your first opinion until you are closer to the ultimate truth, the discovery of which is always the purpose of your research.

It is important to limit your temporary thesis as soon as possible so that, within the limits of the time in which you have to work and the projected or assigned length of the finished paper, the truth of that thesis statement can be investigated thoroughly. No factor is more often responsible for a poor research paper than is the failure to limit a thesis. It is obvious that the less area you try to cover, the more depth you can explore and the more valuable your finished paper will be. As you do your research, you will probably keep narrowing your thesis and limiting the scope of your research to express an idea that can be thoroughly and realistically handled within the space limitation of your paper.

One way to help you limit your thesis is to write a very short, preliminary temporary outline listing in sentence form the main ideas that you hope to develop in order to prove your thesis. Then look to see if any one of those points might serve as the thesis itself. Continue to go through that process until you feel you have limited your thesis as much as possible. Although this thesis is necessarily a temporary one because you have not accumulated all the available facts yet, it does provide you with an angle of vision from which you can continue your research. You now know how you are going to focus on your subject and how you are going to select the material for your research. You are ready now to formulate a more complete temporary outline.