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102_questions_about_thesis.docxThesis Statement Questions
I’ve received some important and very well thought-through questions from a few students over email just yesterday. I thought the answers were worth sharing with the rest of the class.
1.) Wait, are we supposed to make a thesis up?
The answer is, yes! You’re supposed to come up with your own argument. Let’s take a look at the instructions here:
I will offer examples of 102-level thesis statements in the content folder. This is based on what you gather from In Defense of Food and other measures.
In 102, you’re writing something similar to an “argument intro”. You must include two sources of information in addition to your book. These can come from the book’s bibliography, from a citation the book makes, etc. They can be journal articles or counter arguments. It doesn’t matter. However, you need to start building multiple points of view.
Length: no requirement
By this time you must have formed an idea that you want to construct into a 6-8 page essay. It begins by forming a statement. What are you going to argue about? What do you want to convince your audience is true? Which sources are going to help you do that? One of them is your primary authority figure (Pollan). What beyond that have you gathered?
In your 3rd year of college action, you should assume that every class you’ll be taking will be setting you up to buy into or reject one or more sets of major arguments. That’s why English 102 is a requirement for so many courses of study. This class is set up to help you understand and construct college-level arguments no matter what major you end up perusing.
Ultimately, every course will be an attempt to change your point of view, sometimes irrevocably. I like to compare the 3rd and 4th years of college to the experience of learning that the stork does not bring babies home, or that they are not found among the cabbage leaves, or even that they “just grow in mama’s belly” (or whatever). When you learn the truth about the human reproductive system, it’s final. You can never go back to thinking, “Oh, yeah, those babies get brought home by storks.” Ideas like those become absurd.
English 102 has *already* presented you with arguments that you can either accept or reject. Some of them have to do with food, but there have been others since day one that have almost nothing to do with Pollan’s book, except that Pollan assumes we know they’re available to us.
Among them is a takedown of an American cliché: Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. My course argues that this is not only an absurd idea but also a dangerous one. If by “entitled” we mean that listeners should accept or fail to question someone’s opinion, no matter how idiotic and baseless it is, the notion is quite obviously false, at least for someone who wants to become a professional problem solver. You’re “allowed” to believe or claim the earth is the center of the solar system, just like you can freely claim, as people do on various platforms, that one race or ethnicity is a categorical menace. If they’re entitled to spew these things, we’re entitled to consider and reject them.
Consider this idea: you don’t eat food. That claim seems, on the surface, to be quite false. However, after we take a look at Pollan’s argument, and we operate within its definitions, we realize that there’s a relationship between certain diets and certain illnesses. That diet, made up of consumables we’ve not yet evolved to digest and process in the quantities and forms we tend to eat, isn’t food, according to Pollan. His definition of food is “something that sustains us and keeps us healthy,” and hydrogenated oils simply don’t do that.
If you want to argue with him, you need to do what he has done, which is to support his point. If you want to say, “Nutritionism is a perfectly reasonable way of looking at food,” you’ve got to come up with reasons, and they have to be better than Pollan’s.
Of course, you don’t have to argue with him. You can co-opt one of his ideas, like the point about the garden or the point about the best ways to shop in a grocery store, demonstrate that you got it from him, and use it to convince some group of people to change their point of view and position of influence.
2.) What’s an “argument intro”?
This is similar to an abstract or…yeah…a thesis statement. I’ll say more about it when we get to the updated version. The reason we’re taking this in steps is specifically because the chances of you having written one of these in college, at this point, are exceptionally low. However, you’ve already read one. See pages 1-15 of Pollan. His intro is long because his argument is long and detailed. However, the concepts he employs in that intro are identical to the ones we’ll use in our statements.
In short, an intro tells the audience how the argument is going to attempt to change their point of view.
3.) What does “audience” mean?
This is a great question. If you didn’t think about this but can’t answer it, thank your classmates for asking. You should have had this in 101. If you didn’t…well…better now than in July!
We don’t write essays to the ether. Essays don’t target our teachers or professors. Those would be letters or e-mail messages. Academic arguments spend a lot of time targeting specific groups of people, and college arguments *always* (that means 100% of the time with no exceptions at all) target college students or graduates.
Pollan is writing to a “general audience” of readers, perhaps, but if we take a look at how his assumptions operate, and what amount of information someone needs to have gained *before* reading that book, we’ll realize he’s also targeting people who handle things like public health policy, education, urban planning, management of workforces, human resources, corporate wellness programs, etc. The fact that he’s writing a book that’s for sale is already a form of targeting. A particular kind of person goes to a bookstore and buys a book because s/he thinks s/he may not know what food is and needs a provocation. (Think about that!)
We don’t write our arguments, for example, to “parents”. We don’t target “gangbangers” or “Bears fans.” Those people are not in position to influence society in the ways we want.
Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that we wanted to figure out a way to cut down on litter in the neighborhood. The worst possible thing we could do is tell people, “Don’t litter.” That’s totally useless. They’re already littering, and we know they’re going to continue doing it, especially in a place like Chicago where throwing things out the window of your car is culturally acceptable behavior, noticeable even on highways. To cut down on litter, we need to strategize, address people in position to manage the litterbugs.
What would happen, for example, if we put trash cans on the end of every block in our neighborhood. Would they fill up? Who knows. We can try it. Who’s responsible for trash cans? That’s our first question. Who puts them up and manages them. If we want trash cans, we address those people, and they are our public works department. That’s a professional audience, and they’re the kinds of people we talk to when we’re solving social ills.
In a case like that, the best thing to do would be to search and see if someone has already tried it. Has someone in the world…let’s say Milwaukee (I’m completely making this up)…tried to put trash cans out at the ends of blocks in an effort to reduce litter? Let’s pretend we figure out that Milwaukee tried it, and they found that the trash cans filled up to the brim every 24 hours, while litter on the street did not see itself reduced at all. The only thing the trash cans did was cost the city money paying workers to empty them. Well…what must we conclude?
We go further. Why are some places more prone to litter than others? Is there something about their ethos that discourages litter? Could we find a way to adopt that ethos?
Pollan’s argument considers ethos very carefully, and ethos is a way of thinking about large groups of people and audience. He argues that our public health ills are heavily influenced by our economic model and basic cultural assumptions. The way the store operates, the way companies operate, the way industry operates, the way hospitals treat us affects how individual consumers behave; what’s available and culturally acceptable very often influences what choices people have (or believe they have). However, Pollan’s book is as much a product of our current ethos as an attempt to change it. Relationships, we’ll remember, are reciprocal.
I’ll offer up some context. If you walk around Manhattan in New York City, you’ll find small food shops catering to busy professionals but offering whole food lunches. The kinds of cafes and restaurants you’ll find in Lakeview, Andersonville, Logan Square, Hyde Park, Beverly and even nearby Oak Park already cater to a whole food consciousness. Even bagel shops now advertise their choice to use unbleached flour, and certain stores, like Tony’s Finer Foods in North Riverside have put their unbleached flour (like Ceresota) on the middle shelf instead of the bottom shelf, and they stock more of it. What’s that evidence of?
