Setting the Stakes: In addition to identifying a problem or question with respect to your text(s), your paper must establish, preferably in subtle rather than explicit terms, to whom an argument will be helpful – that is, to which academic discipline and to which field(s) within that discipline – and how it will be helpful to that audience. This is what we call setting the stakes: it’s the promise of a pay-off for an argument. It’s not the full-blown statement of the pay-off (that will come in the conclusion to the paper); it’s the identification of the area of study in which there will be a pay-off.

Question/Problem vs. Stakes: You might think of it this way: your question or problem is your statement of why your text calls for interpretation, and your statement of what’s at stake is an explanation of how your interpretation will contribute to an area of academic inquiry that is bigger than just your text.

Moving Argument Beyond Text: When you state what’s at stake, you establish how your response to the problem or question in your text (i.e., your argument) has consequences beyond that particular text. In other words, your argument will reveal something new about your text, and that revelation will, in turn, reveal something new about some field of academic inquiry to which your text bears some relevance.

Specificity in Stakes: Don’t try to be all things to all people. Write to a specific academic audience, and remember that academics are concerned with a specialization. For your essay to be successful, it is imperative that you figure out the area of academic inquiry to which you’re making a contribution (and that you figure out what specifically your contribution to that area of academic inquiry is).

Transformative Arguments: Your argument should be transformative. It should be a claim about a text that is true and not obvious – that’s what your thesis is, a position statement – but your statement of what’s at stake should identify how the argument encapsulated in your thesis statement will bring us to some greater understanding of a specific field of inquiry or line of thought. Or maybe your thesis, if true, would force us to reconsider some assumptions and conventions in a certain field of inquiry or line of thought.

Against Life Lessons: What’s at stake is not the “life lesson” that you can take away from your argument. It is, instead, the “academic lesson.”

Stakes as Topic of Conclusion: Thus, your statement of what’s at stake essentially identifies the topic of your conclusion. That conclusion, when you get there, will fully discuss the implications of your argument. In your introduction, when setting the stakes, your reader doesn’t need a full statement of the implications of your argument. Your reader simply needs to know that there will be implications and to know where your paper is going.

Stakes:Imlications::Thesis:Argument: Just as your thesis is a short preview of your argument, your stakes are a short preview of your implications. Your thesis and stakes are short, punchy, bold, easily accessible statements that come in an introduction. Your argument and implications are longer, detailed, qualified, complex discussions that come in your conclusion.

Less is More: Don’t overdo it: less is more. Set up what’s at stake in one sentence, a few, or a short paragraph. Your reader isn’t ready to deal with that level of your argument yet, but he or she does need to know where your argument is going to end up (i.e., the topic of the conclusion). 

Structuring Stakes: The two most common places to set up the stakes of an argument are at the beginning and the end of the introduction. 

Stakes Last Introduction: One way to structure an introduction is to start with your text. Establish a driving question/problem related to that text, deliver your thesis statement, and then identify what’s at stake in that argument at the end of the intro. So that introduction might look like this: 

Para 1

• Orientation 
• Evidence
• Analysis
• Question/Problem

Para 2

• Text
• Terms
• Thesis
• Stakes

Stakes First Introduction: Another way to structure an introduction is to start with what’s at stake in your argument. Establish a question/problem related to your stakes, propose to answer it by turning to your text, and then deliver your thesis statement at the end of the intro. So that introduction might look like this: 

Para 1

• Orientation to Stakes
• Evidence for Stakes
• Analysis for Stakes
• Stakes

Para 2

• Method / Text
• Terms
• Thesis