The Subject
For a 60,000-word book (4 hours, 12 min), “My favorite fishing spot” is too limited; “Literature” is too extensive; “20th Century Canadian Literature” is probably a good bet.
A 4,000-word essay (1 hour, 6 min) cannot possibly capture “Edgar Allan Poe”, but maybe “Sea images in the writing of Edgar Allan Poe”.
The Thesis
What point am I trying to make about the subject?
| Thesis | Suggestions |
|---|---|
| In a populous society, a 2-party system is more effective than a multiparty system would be | Reader may know this thesis. Include new proofs or arguments. |
| My favorite camping spot is in Minnesota. | Why should the reader care about this? |
| Poe’s sea images represent his symbolic concern with the positive, life-giving experiences that other parts of his work seem to deny. | Probably new to reader. Significant, especially in the literary world. |
| Fishing is the best single activity a man can engage in in order to settle his soul. | Not new, but we are suckers for anything that helps our souls. |
| Napoleon’s dramatic career can be better understood if we realize that he was at heart a frustrated author. | Significant in educated circles, and new enough. |
Placement of the Subject and Thesis
Subject can be in the first sentence or at the other extreme, in the first sentence after preliminary material.
Thesis can be in the climax (middle), or in the conclusion (if it’s drawn from the middle part).
For who-what-when-where-why-how essays (scientific reports and news), the thesis should be at the beginning.
Consistency of Content
Reference the subject at least in every topic sentence of your paragraphs.
Ensure that every paragraph relates directly/indirectly to your thesis.
Don’t digress from your subject and thesis except for rhetorical purposes.
Beautiful Writing: The Iliad, Kenneth Rexroth
Violence is not approved of in itself by the Greeks, but all the values they most admire - the nobility, pride and power, glamour and strength of barbaric chieftains - flourish only in the context of violence and must be fed continuously by it.
Exercises
Form theses of instances when you were forced to look at an experience from a new angle, e.g. a childhood illness, the first stirrings of romance, a youthful criminal adventure, etc.
References
- How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Brysbaert, Marc. Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 109. 2019.
- Reading Times in Hugo and in Medium. github.com . help.medium.com . Aug 22, 2020.
The number of words aren’t intuitive to me. Adults tend to read non-fiction at 238 words per minute. So a good test for how appropriate a piece of writing is, “Can the writer cover X in N minutes?”
Hugo uses 213 WPM, while Medium uses 265 WPM, suggesting Medium has a bias for skimming over close reading.
I wonder if a browser extension that rates the appropriateness of articles given their subject and their word count is a feasible/desirable thing. Then again, we have Twitter with 140 characters ლ(ಠ_ಠ ლ)