Draft Thesis Statements

Now that I've done some exploring with my assignment and article, I'm going to begin drafting the actual essay, starting with thesis sentences.

Thomaseagle. "Sharpened pencil next to sheet paper."
2/11/05 via Wikimedia Commons.
Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Thesis 1:

Cynthia Barnett has worried about water resources long before the 2010 California drought began that gathered national attention, yet she understands the common beliefs and misconceptions about the issue.  In her LA Times article "It's not just a 'California drought'" Barnett's sequential breakdown of drought consequences and historical statistics effectively convey that current water consumption rates are dangerous with nationwide consequences. However, she fails to connect any solutions to drought problems with her readers, the general public, which weakens her effectiveness of her call to action.

Thesis 2:

Cynthia Barnett has the right intentions in her attempt to create general awareness of America's water overconsumption water issue through her LA Times article "It's not just a 'California drought.'"  However, her darkly poetic descriptions of drought and distaste towards policy makers are weakened because she has chosen to write about too much in too little space.  She hasn't allowed herself to look at a narrow topic within the water shortage issue, and focus only on that.

The first thesis is structured similarly to the example in the book.  I think if I rework the language, it is definitely usable.  It addresses the purpose of the article, as well as the audience, logos arguments, and some context.  I can see logically working through the article, and beginning with the effective strategies she used initially to describe the problem, then move onto explaining how her concluding arguments and assertions are less effective than the previous.  Working through the article chronologically could help prevent me from structuring the kind of 5 paragraph essay that I should avoid.

The second thesis statement is a little trickier, and not developed as well.  However, it brings up an important point.  I feel like part of the reason why Barnett wasn't as effective as she could be is because she was attempting to explain too much, which is exploring the context of the issue.  She began with talking about drought in the western states, and then when she went on to talk about the eastern states, she wasn't as thorough.  I understand that her subject was naturally broad, since she wants to prove that drought is a nationwide issue, and I know that water resources and management are very complicated.  But first she was talking about municipal consumption, and then she was talking about agriculture, and all of it was sort of overwhelming to try and understand all at once.


REFLECTION

Reading both Joki and Olivia's theses, I saw that both of them had one thesis that was clearly stronger than the other.  Personally, I had the same thing.  I think this is probably because we spent more time refining just one that we liked, especially after Thursday when we went over writing a thesis in class.  Both of the theses I read definitely seemed strong and workable.  Yoki's I found was more specific and similar to my own.  Oliva's thesis included a response to the actual assignment as well, which was interesting, and showed that she was choosing to address her specific audience right away in the intro.  Because I'm thinking that I'll annotate my essay to show my audience how to effectively write a rhetorical analysis, I don't think I'll take the same approach.