Students in order of appearance: Nicole, Cuyler, Gregg, Hyesu, Hannah, Lili, Deonta, Nicholas
Exercise: Integrate the video
Question
Write a substantial paragraph or two, with a topic sentence or mini-thesis, through which you respond to the students in this video as you form your own approaches to focusing your thesis. You might begin by identifying the moments that stand out to you the most. Which student videos seem to make the most sense to you? With whom do you agree? Disagree? What patterns do you find among the student sound bites? Which ideas were the most instructive or helpful to you? What surprised you? How have your own ideas about thesis come into focus through the videos?
Cuyler has a well-designed, strongly connected, and ideally balanced rhetorical triangle when he says, “My approach to a thesis now is less mechanical. Now, the reason you write a paper is that there’s something about the topic you don’t understand. And so the thesis is oftentimes for me the question itself, or maybe the question rephrased as an answer. And then I take the reader through all the different arguments to show them how I answered that question, or how I arrived at that answer.”
Cuyler use the thesis to connect to his topic and then connect his “arguments” and “answers” with his readers. Whatever your approach to thesis, you will be on the right track if you keep your rhetorical situation in mind as you write.