Chapter 20 Reading Response

Personal Reaction:  In this chapter there wasn't anything that entirely surprised me, however there were a few different things that I had never learned before. On pages 399-400 it talks about Implicit and Explicit thesis statements, an Explicit thesis is basically straight to the point, and an Implicit thesis is more or less an indirect suggestion, which I didn't know before. I enjoyed reading about how to state your thesis on pages 403-405 because it demonstrates how you can continue writing after your thesis, and whether or not it may be easy or a little more challenging. On page 407 it talks about using your thesis to organize, which is personally one of my favorite things about the thesis because it helps me decide how I want to organize the following paragraphs and what points I want to put where. On pages 409-410 the books lists a few ways you can group your ideas together, for example solitaire, slide show, clustering, etc. This section somewhat surprised me simply because I had never heard of some of these methods, so more than anything I found the suggestions interesting. On page 411 it discusses how to do an outline, this topic is irritating to me because it makes me feel like I'm back in middle school. And in no way am I saying that doing an outline of your paper is ineffective or doesn't work, but not everyone thinks and organizes the same way, especially when it comes to writing any paper.

Professional Reaction: I believe this chapter overall is very useful because the Thesis in a paper in my opinion is one of the most important parts, it tells your reader exactly what the point is what they should expect to be reading next. On pages 400-402 the topic is Working Thesis, which is extremely important to know and remember. Although your thesis may sound great the first time your write it, chances are it wont be the same by the time you've revised. Point being is that you can always change it, and if you don't like the revised version you can change it again, as long as the readers known exactly what it is you're talking about. On page 402 considering that I had never been given these examples on how to state your thesis, I found it to be interesting and very good to know, so I figure other people may agree. on pages 405-406 the book talks about how to improve a thesis, and it gives you a take action chart to go through step by step on what direction you should go with your thesis, which I found to be informative and helpful. In the personal reaction I talked about how the outlining process is frustrating for me personally, but as I said not everyone thinks the same and some people find that doing outlines is very helpful to develop their paper, so in general I think it's good to know, and that's talked about on page 411.

-Samantha Gardner
English 122



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