15a Refining your plans

15aRefining your plans

Contents:

Moving from working thesis to explicit thesis

Asking questions about your thesis

Planning design

Video Prompt: When to stop researching

You should by now have notes containing facts, opinions, paraphrases, summaries, quotations, and other material; you probably have images or media to integrate as well. You may also have ideas about how to synthesize these many pieces of information. And you should have some sense of whether your hypothesis has sufficient support. Now is the time to reconsider your purpose, audience, stance, and working thesis.

Moving from working thesis to explicit thesis

Writing out an explicit thesis statement allows you to articulate your major points and to see how well they carry out your purpose and appeal to your audience. Depending on the purpose, audience, and genre of your project, you may or may not decide to include the explicit thesis in your final draft—but developing your working thesis into an explicit statement can still be very useful.

David Craig, the student whose research appears throughout Part 3, developed the following explicit thesis statement (see Chapter 32):

Instant messaging seems to be a positive force in the development of youth literacy because it promotes regular contact with words, the use of a written medium for communication, and the development of an alternative form of literacy.

Asking questions about your thesis

Although writing out an explicit thesis will often confirm your research, you may find that your hypothesis is invalid, inadequately supported, or insufficiently focused. In such cases, you need to rethink your original research question and perhaps do further research. To test your thesis, consider the following questions:

Planning design

As you move toward producing a draft, take some time to think about how you want your research project to look. What font will you use? Should you use color? Do you plan to insert text boxes and visuals? Will you need headings and subheadings? Will you incorporate audio, video, or other media? (For more on design, see Chapter 16.)

For Multilingual Writers: Asking experienced writers to review a thesis