The Imaginative Argument

A Practical Manifesto for Writers - Second Edition

Frank L. Cioffi

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400888191
• Édition: 2
• Sujet: Filología
• Sous-sujet: Escritura creativa

More than merely a writing text, The Imaginative Argument offers writers instruction on how to use their imaginations to improve their prose. Cioffi shows writers how they can enliven argument—the organizing rubric of all persuasive writing—by drawing on emotion, soul, and creativity, the wellsprings of imagination. While Cioffi suggests that argument should become a natural habit of mind for writers, he goes still further, inspiring writers to adopt as their gold standard the imaginative argument: the surprising yet strikingly apt insight that organizes disparate noises into music, that makes out of chaos, chaos theory.Rather than offering a model of writing based on established formulas or templates, Cioffi urges writers to envision argument as an active parsing of experience that imaginatively reinvents the world. Cioffi's manifesto asserts that successful argument also requires writers to explore their own deep-seated feelings, to exploit the fuzzy but often profoundly insightful logic of the imagination.But expression is not all that matters: Cioffi's work anchors itself in the actual. Drawing on Louis Kahn's notion that a good architect never has all the answers to a building's problems before its physical construction, Cioffi maintains that in argument, too, answers must be forged along the way, as the writer inventively deals with emergent problems and unforeseen complexities. Indeed, discovery, imagination, and invention suffuse all stages of the process. The Imaginative Argument offers all the intellectual kindling that writers need to ignite this creativity, from insights on developing ideas to avoiding bland assertions or logical leaps. It cites exemplary nonfiction prose stylists, including William James, Ruth Benedict, and Erving Goffman, as well as literary sources to demonstrate the dynamic of persuasive writing. Provocative and lively, it will prove not only essential reading but also inspiration for all those interested in arguing more imaginatively more successfully.This edition features new chapters that cover the revision process in greater depth, as well as the particular challenges of researching and writing in the digital age, such as working with technology and avoiding plagiarism. The book also includes new sample essays, an appendix to help instructors use the book in the classroom, and much more.

II

Features and Fundamentals of the Imaginative Argument

4 The Thesis

What Is a Thesis, Anyway?

The thesis stands out as the paper’s most important sentence. It’s the formative protein, the DNA of your essay, the compact, coded sequence that predicts the body. The thesis is an interpretation, an angle, an insight, an optic on, a perceptive view of, an analytical slant on, an evaluative synthesis of … something—a text, an issue, a conflict. It explains the most important issue, the one most in need of explanation. The thesis makes up the precious residue that would remain if you had to boil your paper down to just twenty or thirty or forty words, if you had to distill it into its concentrated essence.

Since it is so central to an essay’s power, the thesis should be something you spend considerable time and energy formulating, revising, and polishing. Some writers suggest that you start with only a provisional thesis and write the paper on the basis of it, modifying the thesis as you come to know its ins and outs. Writing in the Chronicle Review, Fordham University English professor Heather Dubrow quotes the architect Louis I. Kahn, whose ideas about a building can be nicely applied to a thesis. “When you have all the answers about a building before you start building it, your answers are not true. The building gives you answers as it grows and becomes itself” (B13). Exactly. When formulating a thesis, you need to realize it will inevitably change as you write your paper; it will become more complex; it will present problems that you had not been able to foresee; it will evolve. You need to leave room for these possibilities.

Another way to see the thesis is as an insight you’ve arrived at (about the topic) only after a lot of thought. It’s a conclusion. The paper, then, explains the thought process you went through to arrive at the thesis, at the same time that it displays this very process. This recursive nature of writing can sometimes be daunting, though, since as you write the paper, you will—unfortunately—often discover flaws in the thought process you used to arrive at the thesis.

Yes, sometimes you will find that what is really original about your paper does not emerge until after you have written five pages’ worth of thoughts on a provisional thesis. Of course once you have made this discovery, you’ll need to go back to the beginning and start anew. (No one promised that writing was going to be easy; in fact, quite the opposite.) In a textbook on writing, the poet Donald Hall suggests you automatically reject the first four or five thesis statements that you think of, as these will be ones that would be obvious to everyone. This is an interesting idea, and one that I always allow to hover in my consciousness, but I should add that sometimes you will come upon an excellent thesis right away. When this happens, I think you will know it. It’s unusual, but it happens now and then: each writing situation has its own structure, its own series of problems, and its own unique solutions. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no single right way to compose.

Writing is hard work. And good writing, while it occasionally springs magically or bewilderingly from your frontal lobes, will more often be the result of revision, reflection, and many hours’ anguished labor. “Labor” is the right word, for writing is in some ways tantamount to giving birth to something very new.

Placement of Thesis

Where should you place your thesis? Many textbook writers insist that a thesis can go anywhere, really—at the beginning, middle, or end of the paper; in fact, the whole paper can be a thesis.

Well, true enough. Such a suggestion is theoretically correct. But it fails to give enough direction. I suggest that you place your thesis near the beginning of the essay. It should probably not be at the very beginning—for the reader needs to be prepared for your idea about a given issue, and probably should know a little about the general subject and topic that you deal with. I recommend placing the thesis at the end of your introduction. This is a safe, albeit conservative positioning of it. You can experiment with placement of the thesis, putting it earlier or later, but this could generate confusion: your reader might not follow what you are arguing for, or think you are arguing something else. Worse, your reader might become bored and ask, “What point is this essay trying to make?”

Wording

Work on the wording of your thesis. Say clearly what you mean. Make the thesis forceful in its impact. Make it live in the reader’s memory. Make it roll off the tongue, slide off the pen, clatter beautifully off the keyboard—or at least appear to have. Avoid using “to be” verbs and passive constructions. We all know the difficulty of coming up with a thesis that seems perfectly honed and smooth, but the effort is worth it. Avoid the clunkiness of structures such as “My thesis is that …” or “I intend to prove the thesis that …” Such verbal constructions might seem to patronize the reader or be perceived as padding. Also, your thesis should be evident without your having to signpost it. Don’t discuss what you are going to do. Just do it.

Sometimes writers feel they don’t want to reveal their main idea right away. Thinking that they need to “save” something for the paper proper, they cultivate a coyness. This is no place for coyness. Reveal your main idea. For example, in an essay comparing Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird with Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, the thesis, “There are several ways in which the two novels differ,” fails to work. It’s a vague, overly general, overly coy thesis. What are the ways that the novels differ, why are the contrasts important, and why should anyone bother to read an essay about them? Let’s improve on it some: “The two novels differ in that the quest in Cold Mountain, while ending ‘unhappily,’ nonetheless enlarges the main characters’ sense of love—for others, for what they are doing; while the quest in The Painted Bird, though one that the protagonist survives, demolishes his and the reader’s sense of hope for the individual, the world, and for all mankind.” You might have to define what you mean by “love” or “hope”—key thesis-linked terms—but this thesis is a great deal more specific and more argumentative: indeed, if your thesis is to live, it will live in its detail, its specificity.

Here is another thesis that could use some tuning up. This one concerns the practice of organ transplantation: “If we are going to continue accomplishing in this practice, action should be taken to diminish the increasingly unanswered demand for human organs.” I have a couple of problems with this thesis. First, “continue accomplishing in this practice” sounds odd. This sentence was generated by a native speaker of English, so there’s no excuse for such an unnatural, awkward formulation. Second, it uses the passive, which makes the thesis too vague: “action should be taken,” it asserts, but I ask, “by whom”? And finally, what kind of action does the writer advocate? It’s necessary to specify in the thesis. Here’s a revised version: “Since any algorithm we invent to ascertain who should get donated organs will be a death sentence for many patients and a life extension for a few, we need to establish more than just that algorithm: we need nothing short of a court of appeals.” Notice, again, that a number of the key terms need to be defined, but the thesis is a good deal more specific, and its argument is relatively clearly stated. But still more imaginativeness is needed, more of a strong and challengeable position. As it stands, I find it difficult to disagree with. It lacks, in a word, edge. Can I supply one? How about ending the thesis above with the following: “We need to establish a court of appeal based on a Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’ standard.” The reader will have to know something about this concept of the “veil of ignorance,” namely that decision makers have no knowledge of their own social status. And the practicability of such a plan is problematic. (The decision makers should also be ignorant of the patients’ social status, I would imagine.) But the thesis has a stronger edge and seems to me a relatively promising start.

The Argumentative Thesis

An argumentative thesis is provocative, interesting, striking—so much so that it catches the reader up short. Yet it’s a balancing act, too, a kind of oxymoron in that it needs to be full of competing opposites: it must be counterintuitive but reasonable; controversial but not an old debate; complex but graspable; creative but grounded in a shared reality. It should be evocative without being vague, clear and specific yet not a mere blueprint for a paper, nuanced but not ambiguous.

The argumentative thesis is not just a verbal fabrication, a manufactured piece of prose that fits a prescribed set of technical specifications. It’s more than an utterance, a notion, a conception, or a proposition; it’s almost a philosophy in that it represents a mode of thought, a kind of discourse, a way of dealing with the world, or, in our situation, with texts of various kinds.

To further capture the elusive construct of an argumentative thesis, I offer an idea from T. S. Eliot in his essay on Dante. Eliot declares that “genuine” poetry—and I think this also applies to the argumentative thesis—“can communicate before it is understood” (206). To be argumentative, a thesis must convey to its audience something complex, interesting, and new—“make it new”—prior to the point at which an audience fully understands it. The paper that emerges from such a thesis will give the fuller explanation, it is to be hoped, but it will be that paper’s burden not only to make understood what could not initially be communicated but also to reveal why it could not be communicated instantly. If, by contrast, the thesis is totally comprehensible at the outset, there is probably something deficient with it, and the paper that follows will, typically, be predictable and ho-hum, as it strenuously argues for something that most readers would accept without proof. Of course it needs to be totally apprehensible and clear, but the genuinely new idea cannot be fully communicable at its first introduction.

“Forethought” Revisited in Light of Argument

How do you generate actively argumentative thesis statements? In the last forty years or so, teachers and professors have been emphasizing the process of writing, and have even opined that that scaffolding process—prewriting, clustering, outlining, gathering evidence, drafting, rewriting—has as much importance as the product, namely, the finished essay. One interesting way of expressing this is from the writer Lee Stringer, who in a public lecture at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, told an audience that writing is not just about construction but about “exploration” and “excavation.”

In general, though, not enough emphasis has been placed on what one might term “forethought” about the paper’s idea or thesis. Going back to Eliot, one might ask what it is that a paper’s thesis communicates prior to its being understood, and part of my answer is that it communicates some of the writer’s forethought. Learning what this forethought consists of can help you generate more complex, more rotund, more fresh and new thesis statements (and better papers), and can help you understand the mode of thought that writing papers such as these both teaches and requires. Elaborating on the ideas of the previous chapter, I want to propose four areas of possible forethought, though I do so only with the proviso that this is by no means an exhaustive list.

1. “Argument” implies that more than one party is involved. And people cannot be intelligent all by themselves. So there must be an audience: what is it like? Clearly, college essays are not written for a universal audience. They are aimed at quite a narrow, even parochial audience: a person professionally involved with the topic, who has read a lot of material about it, and who has doubtless repeatedly read the text or texts under discussion. As I said above, this is a specialist audience—and a sympathetic one. Yet this audience needs a lot to be surprised or enlightened. Indeed, this audience longs for surprise, is parched for enlightenment. This audience does not want, for example, simplistic answers to rather obvious questions, or, for that matter, reductive answers to complex questions. This audience does not want a thesis he or she has read before, many—or even a few—times.

2. Forethought also needs to consider the competition: possible as well as actual competing explanations need to be looked at, imagined, or at least provisionally constructed. Just as when I decide to write a scholarly article on, say, a poet named Hilda Doolittle, or H.D., I turn to the articles that have already appeared about her (and about imagist poetry, about early twentieth-century American poetry, about women’s poetry, among others) in order to determine the context for what I might write; just as I look at and read other articles in journals I want to publish in to see the kinds of approaches being used, the level of documentation, the affiliations of the authors, the length and style of the essays, so you must look to your “competition”—namely, fellow students. Of course this is in a more difficult task than mine, since you don’t typically have access to your classmates’ essays. You need to infer the kinds of things that scholars can more easily discern about competition.

A knowledge of the competition forms an important element of forethought—and constitutes a furthering of the notion of audience, for as the audience reads the multiple responses in a class or in a journal, that audience’s expectations change: its patience with certain kinds of ideas diminishes, just as its longing for others (or maybe just for unfamiliar ones) is likely to become more acute. Of course this can be intimidating, too—but after you have finished being intimidated by the writing of your peers, and after they’ve finished being intimidated by aspects of yours that you probably didn’t even think about, then maybe you can all sit down to do something even more worthwhile.

3. Forethought also involves determining your relation to the assignment. What does the assignment really call for? Is it looking for reiteration of the ideas of the course, or is it looking for some inventive, original idea? Is it requiring you to show that you’ve grasped certain concepts, that you can handle a certain technical vocabulary being taught? To what extent is the assignment actually just testing whether you’ve “gotten” the ideas of, say, four or five key texts? To what extent is the assignment about the text, and to what extent is the text supposed to be used only as a pretext? Often, the argumentativeness of a thesis hinges on certain unspoken guidelines, which, not too surprisingly, vary from course to course, situation to situation.

4. Last piece of forethought, but in some ways the prime mover: You need to grapple with your own response to a work or works, or to a series of ideas under scrutiny in a class. If your reaction is muted or nonexistent, then why write anything? (When I was a freshman, I never even considered the option of telling a professor that the provided paper topics all seemed boring to me. But I should have done so when that was the case, and teachers should encourage students to take that initiative.) One teacher mentioned that there are no boring texts or topics, only boring people. I wonder.

If you have generated a thesis you are certain is correct, then why argue for that thesis? This connects both with Louis I. Kahn’s idea about a building and also with the notion of “negative capability”: John Keats’s idea that writers should be willing to inhabit realms of abstraction and nonclarity for relatively long periods of time before responding to things. I want to suggest that inhabiting those realms is sometimes valuable insofar as doing so does not have definitive results. “The only means of strengthening the intellect,” Keats declares in a letter he wrote to George and Georgiana Keats in September 1819, “is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thought” (515). Forethought about one’s own various responses to a work suggests that writers run down many uncharted thoroughfares and byways and endure blunting up against the walls that close some of them off. Of course, blunting up against things is not a lot of fun. Keats offers Shakespeare as the example of a person “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Letter to George and Thomas Kea...