You probably know (from high school or elsewhere) that a paper is supposed to have a thesis statement.

You may have been told (in high school or elsewhere) to state your thesis in your introduction, and then to restate it using different words in your conclusion. Perhaps your reaction to this idea is the same as mine: Why didn’t you just read my thesis the first time around when I said it exactly how I wanted to say it?

The suggestion that you “restate your thesis in different words” comes from a failure to differentiate between a thesis and an argument.

A thesis can be thought of as a short (one- or two-sentence) statement of the proposition that you want your reader to accept.

An argument is a longer (one paragraph or so, sometimes more, sometimes broken up and peppered throughout a paper) summary of the ideas at work behind a thesis statement, an unpacking of the concepts in play and the relationships between them.

In other words, an argument is a rather detailed overview of the components, structure, and operation of an idea. A thesis is an easily accessible report of the main point of that idea. Your thesis is the one thing you want your reader to understand, the one thing you most want your reader to remember about your paper, even if that “one thing” has many moving parts. Your argument is a description of all of those parts.

Which comes first, the thesis or the argument? Well, it depends. In terms of the sequence of your research process, your argument comes before your thesis. That is, you must have an understanding of the complex set of ideas that you wish to present (i.e., your argument) before you write a short summary of your main proposition about those ideas (i.e., your thesis statement). In terms of the organization of your paper, however, your thesis comes before your argument. That is, you should give a short articulation of your proposition (your thesis) early in your paper, to serve as a guiding light for your reader, while the longer overview of all of the ideas that rest behind your proposition (your argument) will come later in your paper, to serve as a retrospective synthesis for your reader. 

The word argument comes from a Latin word related to clarity and visibility, arguere, which means “to make clear.” Clarity is the quintessential aspect of an argument, and here we should observe the difference between poetry and criticism. The purpose of poetry is to explore the complexities of our world through the use of ambiguity, irony, and the suggestive influence of the unexpressed. Criticism is different: it is the exploration of complexity through clarity: clear thinking and clear writing. There should be no ambiguity or irony in your argument, nothing merely suggestive, nothing unexpressed.

What makes an argument good? Clarity, complexity, specificity, riskiness, passion.

One thing that makes an argument good is for it to be bold, daring, risk-taking, not obvious or dispassionate. When writing a paper, take a moment to ask your self, “Is this really what I want to argue?” Do you have an argument that you’re passionate about, that you’re invested in, or are you just going through the motions to fulfill an assignment?

Remember that intellectual breakthroughs only come when intellectual risks are taken. If you’re worried about your grade, don’t be (at least in my classes). Because taking an intellectual risk is always harder than playing it intellectually safe, in my grading, I always reward a risk that’s taken, even if it doesn’t fully pay off, more than a paper that plays it safe and produces a reading at which I politely nod in tepid agreement.

You should be able to draw or map the structure of your argument. You should be able to create a flowchart or conceptual map that clearly and specifically states what you think is true and why it is true. If you think of a simple bubble-and-arrow flowchart, you might try putting information and concepts into bubbles, and mapping the relationships between these things with arrows.

Sometimes it can help you explain the logic behind your argument to review and respond to some counter-evidence and counter-arguments to it. This can be done either after the short thesis statement that comes in your introduction or after the longer argument statement that appears, usually, in your conclusion.

Consider, while in the body of you paper, as a way to transition from one section to another, elevating your discussion up to the level of the argument, summarizing it up to this point, and then diving back down to the level of evidence and analysis. If you do so, you don’t need to summarize your entire argument when you get to your conclusion: you only need to summarize the aspects of your argument that you’ve put forth since your last summary, and then you can shift into your concluding discussion. This summarization in stages can help you avoid the need to summarize in full at the beginning of your conclusion, a move that can sometimes feel mechanical.