The Writing Centre
How to get to a thesis
One of the distinctive things about academic writing is that it not usually simply concerned with reporting on or
describing aspects of our world; rather, it has the goal of explaining, of making sense of important aspects of our world
and our life in it. To this end, it examines the evidence with regard to a particular issue and takes a position on the
significance/meaning of that evidence. Or, to put it another way, it has a THESIS (the point it wishes to make), and the
purpose of the bulk of the writing is to explain why the evidence has led the writer to hold, or argue for, that position.
(NOTE: academic writers do not take a position and then seek out the evidence to support it. That would not be a sound
scholarly approach; it would be more like propaganda). Easy to say, but how to do it? We are dealing with the world and
the human mind in all their mutual complexity. There is not one simple set of steps that will deliver you to your thesis,
but I think we can identify a broad approach that will help you move along this path. NOTE: Try asking your prof and/or
coming to the writing Centre.
Example
Let’s imagine that a professor, maybe in Sport and Leisure, or Sociology, or maybe English 115, asks you to write a
research paper in response to the following prompt: Qu. Consider the significance of the “Grunt-o-meter” in sport. The
prof also tells you that you have to use at least three articles from peer-reviewed journals.
1. It is a KEY step to think about this wording carefully. “Consider” is one of those catch–all words profs use that
really means “think about”. “Discuss” would be another word that has the same kind of effect. And what are we
thinking about? The “significance” of this thing, the “grunt-o-meter.” What do we mean by “significance”? Well,
something like the important aspects of the grunt-o-meter.
2. A useful stage to undertake is, if you don’t have a question, structure your inquiry as a question: What is the
thing you want to know, that you don’t yet know: for example, What are the important aspects of the grunt-ometer? We should be able to hone this a bit as we proceed. But we can’t do much more until we have some
data – i.e. until we know something about the grunt-o-meter.
3. So now you need to do some reading. Maybe your prof has given you something, so read that. And don’t read as
a consumer, read as an active thinker. What is this writer trying to tell me? What does this section or this
paragraph say? And how does it contribute to the whole? And this part…? Struggling? Ask your prof, come to
the Writing Centre.
4. Maybe your prof hasn’t given you anything, or maybe you want to read more. How do you find it? Use your
search tools, in Google, AND ESPECIALLY in the library website. I’ll search that term ”grunt-o-meter” in Google
now. First thing up is an article from USA Today (a big US daily newspaper): “Wimbledon WTA plan to curb
grunting.” Not a bad place to get a bit of background. OK, I swiftly figure out two things: it’s about tennis, and
more specifically, it seems to be about women’s tennis. Some women, it seems, make a lot of noise by grunting
when they hit the ball. Some players and spectators find it distracting, so there is a move to make players reduce
the volume by setting some sort of objective level of acceptability. How to do that? You need the ability to
measure the volume – hence the grunt-o-meter, a device for measuring the volume of the players’ grunts.
5. Hmmm. Significance? Importance? Generate more questions: You might have thought you were being asked
about the grunt-o-meter itself – does it work? Does it measure objectively, or does it matter which end the
player is standing. But you aren’t an engineer and this isn’t an engineering class. Instead you might think
something like, what is the role of technology in sport in changing ideas of objectivity? One person interviewed
for the article says “Can you imagine on a critical point an umpire going, 'Oh, I thought you were too loud.' You
have to take all of that out of the equation.” Or you might think…. What about men? They grunt too. Or Why is it
used for women? The writer raises that question in fact, and quotes Martina Navratilova, the famous female
tennis player: “The women are definitely louder and more abrasive.” Do we take her word for it? Could we look
into that? I feel interested in this question. Maybe a more focused, more academic search is in order. I search
“grunt-o-meter” in the library search box and get more newspaper articles. I restrict the search to peerreviewed articles from academic journals. I get nothing. So am I in trouble? No academic articles on this topic?
Too soon to say. You’ve got to search, so I get digging. I search ”women grunt tennis” with the academic journal
box still ticked. Yes! I get lots of interesting-looking stuff. In an article called “Microaggressions and female
Athletes” from the journal, Sex Roles, Kaskan and Ho (2016) consider grunting among other issues for female
athletes. They write:
We believe it would send a message to the younger generation of female players to be more subdued in
their games and hold back, especially since there has been no equivalent move to rein in grunting in
men’s tennis. This implies that women, even when engaging in intense physical activity, must still be
concerned with maintaining acceptable ladylike behavior.
Interesting! And useful! And note – there is no PERFECT article for you; there are more or less useful articles.
Document your thinking/sources as you go through that process – take notes.
6. You read more: other articles that came up in the search include titles like “Trivializing the Female Body: A
Cross-cultural Analysis of the Representation of Women in Sports Journalism,” and “Pornographic eroticism and
sexual grotesquerie in representations of African American sportswomen.” You read the abstracts, the opening
and closing paragraphs. You begin to get the idea of a broader issue that this grunt-o-meter fits into. You might
have thought of the grunt-o-meter as simply a device to control the noise-levels of female tennis players, but
you might now ask yourself, What is it really controlling? Your reading suggests that it may be part of a wider
cultural process that polices how women should look and behave. That is, it is part of a process that enforces a
narrow view, a stereotype, of what constitutes an acceptable version of femininity for female athletes.
7. Now we begin to see the purpose of a paper we might write in response to this issue. We may find ourselves, as
a result of our research into the question “what is the significance of the grunt-o-meter’s use in women’s
tennis”, persuaded to argue that “The Grunt-o-Meter is not just a device to police the noise levels of female
tennis players; it is part of a far-reaching cultural process that seeks to enforce a highly restrictive idea of the
feminine in tennis and in women’s sport in general.” That is your thesis. I think you would do best to write a
paper that focused on tennis (as the game where the grunt-o-meter operates) but cover other ways in which the
behavior of women tennis players is controlled, and we could also link it to the wider issue of the representation
of women in sport in general. I think we would have no trouble finding plenty of information both journalistic
and academic around this issue.
Cameron Hoffman-McGaw/John Hill, 2016