what is the thesis of johnson's essay

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Writing a Paper: Thesis Statements

Basics of thesis statements.

The thesis statement is the brief articulation of your paper's central argument and purpose. You might hear it referred to as simply a "thesis." Every scholarly paper should have a thesis statement, and strong thesis statements are concise, specific, and arguable. Concise means the thesis is short: perhaps one or two sentences for a shorter paper. Specific means the thesis deals with a narrow and focused topic, appropriate to the paper's length. Arguable means that a scholar in your field could disagree (or perhaps already has!).

Strong thesis statements address specific intellectual questions, have clear positions, and use a structure that reflects the overall structure of the paper. Read on to learn more about constructing a strong thesis statement.

Being Specific

This thesis statement has no specific argument:

Needs Improvement: In this essay, I will examine two scholarly articles to find similarities and differences.

This statement is concise, but it is neither specific nor arguable—a reader might wonder, "Which scholarly articles? What is the topic of this paper? What field is the author writing in?" Additionally, the purpose of the paper—to "examine…to find similarities and differences" is not of a scholarly level. Identifying similarities and differences is a good first step, but strong academic argument goes further, analyzing what those similarities and differences might mean or imply.

Better: In this essay, I will argue that Bowler's (2003) autocratic management style, when coupled with Smith's (2007) theory of social cognition, can reduce the expenses associated with employee turnover.

The new revision here is still concise, as well as specific and arguable.  We can see that it is specific because the writer is mentioning (a) concrete ideas and (b) exact authors.  We can also gather the field (business) and the topic (management and employee turnover). The statement is arguable because the student goes beyond merely comparing; he or she draws conclusions from that comparison ("can reduce the expenses associated with employee turnover").

Making a Unique Argument

This thesis draft repeats the language of the writing prompt without making a unique argument:

Needs Improvement: The purpose of this essay is to monitor, assess, and evaluate an educational program for its strengths and weaknesses. Then, I will provide suggestions for improvement.

You can see here that the student has simply stated the paper's assignment, without articulating specifically how he or she will address it. The student can correct this error simply by phrasing the thesis statement as a specific answer to the assignment prompt.

Better: Through a series of student interviews, I found that Kennedy High School's antibullying program was ineffective. In order to address issues of conflict between students, I argue that Kennedy High School should embrace policies outlined by the California Department of Education (2010).

Words like "ineffective" and "argue" show here that the student has clearly thought through the assignment and analyzed the material; he or she is putting forth a specific and debatable position. The concrete information ("student interviews," "antibullying") further prepares the reader for the body of the paper and demonstrates how the student has addressed the assignment prompt without just restating that language.

Creating a Debate

This thesis statement includes only obvious fact or plot summary instead of argument:

Needs Improvement: Leadership is an important quality in nurse educators.

A good strategy to determine if your thesis statement is too broad (and therefore, not arguable) is to ask yourself, "Would a scholar in my field disagree with this point?" Here, we can see easily that no scholar is likely to argue that leadership is an unimportant quality in nurse educators.  The student needs to come up with a more arguable claim, and probably a narrower one; remember that a short paper needs a more focused topic than a dissertation.

Better: Roderick's (2009) theory of participatory leadership  is particularly appropriate to nurse educators working within the emergency medicine field, where students benefit most from collegial and kinesthetic learning.

Here, the student has identified a particular type of leadership ("participatory leadership"), narrowing the topic, and has made an arguable claim (this type of leadership is "appropriate" to a specific type of nurse educator). Conceivably, a scholar in the nursing field might disagree with this approach. The student's paper can now proceed, providing specific pieces of evidence to support the arguable central claim.

Choosing the Right Words

This thesis statement uses large or scholarly-sounding words that have no real substance:

Needs Improvement: Scholars should work to seize metacognitive outcomes by harnessing discipline-based networks to empower collaborative infrastructures.

There are many words in this sentence that may be buzzwords in the student's field or key terms taken from other texts, but together they do not communicate a clear, specific meaning. Sometimes students think scholarly writing means constructing complex sentences using special language, but actually it's usually a stronger choice to write clear, simple sentences. When in doubt, remember that your ideas should be complex, not your sentence structure.

Better: Ecologists should work to educate the U.S. public on conservation methods by making use of local and national green organizations to create a widespread communication plan.

Notice in the revision that the field is now clear (ecology), and the language has been made much more field-specific ("conservation methods," "green organizations"), so the reader is able to see concretely the ideas the student is communicating.

Leaving Room for Discussion

This thesis statement is not capable of development or advancement in the paper:

Needs Improvement: There are always alternatives to illegal drug use.

This sample thesis statement makes a claim, but it is not a claim that will sustain extended discussion. This claim is the type of claim that might be appropriate for the conclusion of a paper, but in the beginning of the paper, the student is left with nowhere to go. What further points can be made? If there are "always alternatives" to the problem the student is identifying, then why bother developing a paper around that claim? Ideally, a thesis statement should be complex enough to explore over the length of the entire paper.

Better: The most effective treatment plan for methamphetamine addiction may be a combination of pharmacological and cognitive therapy, as argued by Baker (2008), Smith (2009), and Xavier (2011).

In the revised thesis, you can see the student make a specific, debatable claim that has the potential to generate several pages' worth of discussion. When drafting a thesis statement, think about the questions your thesis statement will generate: What follow-up inquiries might a reader have? In the first example, there are almost no additional questions implied, but the revised example allows for a good deal more exploration.

Thesis Mad Libs

If you are having trouble getting started, try using the models below to generate a rough model of a thesis statement! These models are intended for drafting purposes only and should not appear in your final work.

• In this essay, I argue ____, using ______ to assert _____.
• While scholars have often argued ______, I argue______, because_______.
• Through an analysis of ______, I argue ______, which is important because_______.

Words to Avoid and to Embrace

When drafting your thesis statement, avoid words like explore, investigate, learn, compile, summarize , and explain to describe the main purpose of your paper. These words imply a paper that summarizes or "reports," rather than synthesizing and analyzing.

Instead of the terms above, try words like argue, critique, question , and interrogate . These more analytical words may help you begin strongly, by articulating a specific, critical, scholarly position.

Read Kayla's blog post for tips on taking a stand in a well-crafted thesis statement.

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Didn't find what you need? Email us at [email protected] .

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Thesis Statements

What this handout is about.

This handout describes what a thesis statement is, how thesis statements work in your writing, and how you can craft or refine one for your draft.

Introduction

Writing in college often takes the form of persuasion—convincing others that you have an interesting, logical point of view on the subject you are studying. Persuasion is a skill you practice regularly in your daily life. You persuade your roommate to clean up, your parents to let you borrow the car, your friend to vote for your favorite candidate or policy. In college, course assignments often ask you to make a persuasive case in writing. You are asked to convince your reader of your point of view. This form of persuasion, often called academic argument, follows a predictable pattern in writing. After a brief introduction of your topic, you state your point of view on the topic directly and often in one sentence. This sentence is the thesis statement, and it serves as a summary of the argument you’ll make in the rest of your paper.

What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement:

• tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion.
• is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper.
• directly answers the question asked of you. A thesis is an interpretation of a question or subject, not the subject itself. The subject, or topic, of an essay might be World War II or Moby Dick; a thesis must then offer a way to understand the war or the novel.
• makes a claim that others might dispute.
• is usually a single sentence near the beginning of your paper (most often, at the end of the first paragraph) that presents your argument to the reader. The rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers and organizes evidence that will persuade the reader of the logic of your interpretation.

If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt, ask your instructor if the assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze, to interpret, to compare and contrast, to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout on understanding assignments for more information.)

How do I create a thesis?

A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a “working thesis” that presents a basic or main idea and an argument that you think you can support with evidence. Both the argument and your thesis are likely to need adjustment along the way.

Writers use all kinds of techniques to stimulate their thinking and to help them clarify relationships or comprehend the broader significance of a topic and arrive at a thesis statement. For more ideas on how to get started, see our handout on brainstorming .

How do I know if my thesis is strong?

If there’s time, run it by your instructor or make an appointment at the Writing Center to get some feedback. Even if you do not have time to get advice elsewhere, you can do some thesis evaluation of your own. When reviewing your first draft and its working thesis, ask yourself the following :

• Do I answer the question? Re-reading the question prompt after constructing a working thesis can help you fix an argument that misses the focus of the question. If the prompt isn’t phrased as a question, try to rephrase it. For example, “Discuss the effect of X on Y” can be rephrased as “What is the effect of X on Y?”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it’s possible that you are simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a strong argument. If your thesis contains words like “good” or “successful,” see if you could be more specific: why is something “good”; what specifically makes something “successful”?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? If a reader’s first response is likely to  be “So what?” then you need to clarify, to forge a relationship, or to connect to a larger issue.
• Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering? If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. It’s okay to change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured out in the course of writing your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as necessary.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? If a reader’s first response is “how?” or “why?” your thesis may be too open-ended and lack guidance for the reader. See what you can add to give the reader a better take on your position right from the beginning.

Suppose you are taking a course on contemporary communication, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment: “Discuss the impact of social media on public awareness.” Looking back at your notes, you might start with this working thesis:

Social media impacts public awareness in both positive and negative ways.

You can use the questions above to help you revise this general statement into a stronger thesis.

• Do I answer the question? You can analyze this if you rephrase “discuss the impact” as “what is the impact?” This way, you can see that you’ve answered the question only very generally with the vague “positive and negative ways.”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not likely. Only people who maintain that social media has a solely positive or solely negative impact could disagree.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? No. What are the positive effects? What are the negative effects?
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? No. Why are they positive? How are they positive? What are their causes? Why are they negative? How are they negative? What are their causes?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? No. Why should anyone care about the positive and/or negative impact of social media?

After thinking about your answers to these questions, you decide to focus on the one impact you feel strongly about and have strong evidence for:

Because not every voice on social media is reliable, people have become much more critical consumers of information, and thus, more informed voters.

This version is a much stronger thesis! It answers the question, takes a specific position that others can challenge, and it gives a sense of why it matters.

Let’s try another. Suppose your literature professor hands out the following assignment in a class on the American novel: Write an analysis of some aspect of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. “This will be easy,” you think. “I loved Huckleberry Finn!” You grab a pad of paper and write:

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.

You begin to analyze your thesis:

• Do I answer the question? No. The prompt asks you to analyze some aspect of the novel. Your working thesis is a statement of general appreciation for the entire novel.

Think about aspects of the novel that are important to its structure or meaning—for example, the role of storytelling, the contrasting scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships between adults and children. Now you write:

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.

• Do I answer the question? Yes!
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not really. This contrast is well-known and accepted.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? It’s getting there–you have highlighted an important aspect of the novel for investigation. However, it’s still not clear what your analysis will reveal.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? Not yet. Compare scenes from the book and see what you discover. Free write, make lists, jot down Huck’s actions and reactions and anything else that seems interesting.
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? What’s the point of this contrast? What does it signify?”

After examining the evidence and considering your own insights, you write:

Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must leave “civilized” society and go back to nature.

This final thesis statement presents an interpretation of a literary work based on an analysis of its content. Of course, for the essay itself to be successful, you must now present evidence from the novel that will convince the reader of your interpretation.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Ramage, John D., John C. Bean, and June Johnson. 2018. The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing , 8th ed. New York: Pearson.

Ruszkiewicz, John J., Christy Friend, Daniel Seward, and Maxine Hairston. 2010. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers , 9th ed. Boston: Pearson Education.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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How to write a thesis statement + examples

What is a thesis statement?

Is a thesis statement a question, how do you write a good thesis statement, how do i know if my thesis statement is good, examples of thesis statements, helpful resources on how to write a thesis statement, frequently asked questions about writing a thesis statement, related articles.

A thesis statement is the main argument of your paper or thesis.

The thesis statement is one of the most important elements of any piece of academic writing . It is a brief statement of your paper’s main argument. Essentially, you are stating what you will be writing about.

You can see your thesis statement as an answer to a question. While it also contains the question, it should really give an answer to the question with new information and not just restate or reiterate it.

Your thesis statement is part of your introduction. Learn more about how to write a good thesis introduction in our introduction guide .

A thesis statement is not a question. A statement must be arguable and provable through evidence and analysis. While your thesis might stem from a research question, it should be in the form of a statement.

Tip: A thesis statement is typically 1-2 sentences. For a longer project like a thesis, the statement may be several sentences or a paragraph.

A good thesis statement needs to do the following:

• Condense the main idea of your thesis into one or two sentences.
• Answer your project’s main research question.
• Clearly state your position in relation to the topic .
• Make an argument that requires support or evidence.

Once you have written down a thesis statement, check if it fulfills the following criteria:

• Your statement needs to be provable by evidence. As an argument, a thesis statement needs to be debatable.
• Your statement needs to be precise. Do not give away too much information in the thesis statement and do not load it with unnecessary information.
• Your statement cannot say that one solution is simply right or simply wrong as a matter of fact. You should draw upon verified facts to persuade the reader of your solution, but you cannot just declare something as right or wrong.

As previously mentioned, your thesis statement should answer a question.

If the question is:

What do you think the City of New York should do to reduce traffic congestion?

A good thesis statement restates the question and answers it:

In this paper, I will argue that the City of New York should focus on providing exclusive lanes for public transport and adaptive traffic signals to reduce traffic congestion by the year 2035.

Here is another example. If the question is:

How can we end poverty?

A good thesis statement should give more than one solution to the problem in question:

In this paper, I will argue that introducing universal basic income can help reduce poverty and positively impact the way we work.

• The Writing Center of the University of North Carolina has a list of questions to ask to see if your thesis is strong .

A thesis statement is part of the introduction of your paper. It is usually found in the first or second paragraph to let the reader know your research purpose from the beginning.

In general, a thesis statement should have one or two sentences. But the length really depends on the overall length of your project. Take a look at our guide about the length of thesis statements for more insight on this topic.

Here is a list of Thesis Statement Examples that will help you understand better how to write them.

Every good essay should include a thesis statement as part of its introduction, no matter the academic level. Of course, if you are a high school student you are not expected to have the same type of thesis as a PhD student.

Here is a great YouTube tutorial showing How To Write An Essay: Thesis Statements .

Developing a Thesis Statement

Many papers you write require developing a thesis statement. In this section you’ll learn what a thesis statement is and how to write one.

Keep in mind that not all papers require thesis statements . If in doubt, please consult your instructor for assistance.

What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement . . .

• Makes an argumentative assertion about a topic; it states the conclusions that you have reached about your topic.
• Makes a promise to the reader about the scope, purpose, and direction of your paper.
• Is focused and specific enough to be “proven” within the boundaries of your paper.
• Is generally located near the end of the introduction ; sometimes, in a long paper, the thesis will be expressed in several sentences or in an entire paragraph.
• Identifies the relationships between the pieces of evidence that you are using to support your argument.

Not all papers require thesis statements! Ask your instructor if you’re in doubt whether you need one.

Identify a topic

Your topic is the subject about which you will write. Your assignment may suggest several ways of looking at a topic; or it may name a fairly general concept that you will explore or analyze in your paper.

Consider what your assignment asks you to do

Inform yourself about your topic, focus on one aspect of your topic, ask yourself whether your topic is worthy of your efforts, generate a topic from an assignment.

Below are some possible topics based on sample assignments.

Sample assignment 1

Analyze Spain’s neutrality in World War II.

Identified topic

Franco’s role in the diplomatic relationships between the Allies and the Axis

This topic avoids generalities such as “Spain” and “World War II,” addressing instead on Franco’s role (a specific aspect of “Spain”) and the diplomatic relations between the Allies and Axis (a specific aspect of World War II).

Sample assignment 2

Analyze one of Homer’s epic similes in the Iliad.

The relationship between the portrayal of warfare and the epic simile about Simoisius at 4.547-64.

This topic focuses on a single simile and relates it to a single aspect of the Iliad ( warfare being a major theme in that work).

Developing a Thesis Statement–Additional information

Your assignment may suggest several ways of looking at a topic, or it may name a fairly general concept that you will explore or analyze in your paper. You’ll want to read your assignment carefully, looking for key terms that you can use to focus your topic.

Sample assignment: Analyze Spain’s neutrality in World War II Key terms: analyze, Spain’s neutrality, World War II

After you’ve identified the key words in your topic, the next step is to read about them in several sources, or generate as much information as possible through an analysis of your topic. Obviously, the more material or knowledge you have, the more possibilities will be available for a strong argument. For the sample assignment above, you’ll want to look at books and articles on World War II in general, and Spain’s neutrality in particular.

As you consider your options, you must decide to focus on one aspect of your topic. This means that you cannot include everything you’ve learned about your topic, nor should you go off in several directions. If you end up covering too many different aspects of a topic, your paper will sprawl and be unconvincing in its argument, and it most likely will not fulfull the assignment requirements.

For the sample assignment above, both Spain’s neutrality and World War II are topics far too broad to explore in a paper. You may instead decide to focus on Franco’s role in the diplomatic relationships between the Allies and the Axis , which narrows down what aspects of Spain’s neutrality and World War II you want to discuss, as well as establishes a specific link between those two aspects.

Before you go too far, however, ask yourself whether your topic is worthy of your efforts. Try to avoid topics that already have too much written about them (i.e., “eating disorders and body image among adolescent women”) or that simply are not important (i.e. “why I like ice cream”). These topics may lead to a thesis that is either dry fact or a weird claim that cannot be supported. A good thesis falls somewhere between the two extremes. To arrive at this point, ask yourself what is new, interesting, contestable, or controversial about your topic.

As you work on your thesis, remember to keep the rest of your paper in mind at all times . Sometimes your thesis needs to evolve as you develop new insights, find new evidence, or take a different approach to your topic.

Derive a main point from topic

Once you have a topic, you will have to decide what the main point of your paper will be. This point, the “controlling idea,” becomes the core of your argument (thesis statement) and it is the unifying idea to which you will relate all your sub-theses. You can then turn this “controlling idea” into a purpose statement about what you intend to do in your paper.

Look for patterns in your evidence

Compose a purpose statement.

Consult the examples below for suggestions on how to look for patterns in your evidence and construct a purpose statement.

• Franco first tried to negotiate with the Axis
• Franco turned to the Allies when he couldn’t get some concessions that he wanted from the Axis

Possible conclusion:

Spain’s neutrality in WWII occurred for an entirely personal reason: Franco’s desire to preserve his own (and Spain’s) power.

Purpose statement

This paper will analyze Franco’s diplomacy during World War II to see how it contributed to Spain’s neutrality.

• The simile compares Simoisius to a tree, which is a peaceful, natural image.
• The tree in the simile is chopped down to make wheels for a chariot, which is an object used in warfare.

At first, the simile seems to take the reader away from the world of warfare, but we end up back in that world by the end.

This paper will analyze the way the simile about Simoisius at 4.547-64 moves in and out of the world of warfare.

Derive purpose statement from topic

To find out what your “controlling idea” is, you have to examine and evaluate your evidence . As you consider your evidence, you may notice patterns emerging, data repeated in more than one source, or facts that favor one view more than another. These patterns or data may then lead you to some conclusions about your topic and suggest that you can successfully argue for one idea better than another.

For instance, you might find out that Franco first tried to negotiate with the Axis, but when he couldn’t get some concessions that he wanted from them, he turned to the Allies. As you read more about Franco’s decisions, you may conclude that Spain’s neutrality in WWII occurred for an entirely personal reason: his desire to preserve his own (and Spain’s) power. Based on this conclusion, you can then write a trial thesis statement to help you decide what material belongs in your paper.

Sometimes you won’t be able to find a focus or identify your “spin” or specific argument immediately. Like some writers, you might begin with a purpose statement just to get yourself going. A purpose statement is one or more sentences that announce your topic and indicate the structure of the paper but do not state the conclusions you have drawn . Thus, you might begin with something like this:

• This paper will look at modern language to see if it reflects male dominance or female oppression.
• I plan to analyze anger and derision in offensive language to see if they represent a challenge of society’s authority.

At some point, you can turn a purpose statement into a thesis statement. As you think and write about your topic, you can restrict, clarify, and refine your argument, crafting your thesis statement to reflect your thinking.

As you work on your thesis, remember to keep the rest of your paper in mind at all times. Sometimes your thesis needs to evolve as you develop new insights, find new evidence, or take a different approach to your topic.

Compose a draft thesis statement

If you are writing a paper that will have an argumentative thesis and are having trouble getting started, the techniques in the table below may help you develop a temporary or “working” thesis statement.

Begin with a purpose statement that you will later turn into a thesis statement.

Assignment: Discuss the history of the Reform Party and explain its influence on the 1990 presidential and Congressional election.

Purpose Statement: This paper briefly sketches the history of the grassroots, conservative, Perot-led Reform Party and analyzes how it influenced the economic and social ideologies of the two mainstream parties.

Question-to-Assertion

If your assignment asks a specific question(s), turn the question(s) into an assertion and give reasons why it is true or reasons for your opinion.

Assignment : What do Aylmer and Rappaccini have to be proud of? Why aren’t they satisfied with these things? How does pride, as demonstrated in “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” lead to unexpected problems?

Beginning thesis statement: Alymer and Rappaccinni are proud of their great knowledge; however, they are also very greedy and are driven to use their knowledge to alter some aspect of nature as a test of their ability. Evil results when they try to “play God.”

Write a sentence that summarizes the main idea of the essay you plan to write.

Main idea: The reason some toys succeed in the market is that they appeal to the consumers’ sense of the ridiculous and their basic desire to laugh at themselves.

Make a list of the ideas that you want to include; consider the ideas and try to group them.

• nature = peaceful
• war matériel = violent (competes with 1?)
• need for time and space to mourn the dead
• war is inescapable (competes with 3?)

Use a formula to arrive at a working thesis statement (you will revise this later).

• although most readers of _______ have argued that _______, closer examination shows that _______.
• _______ uses _______ and _____ to prove that ________.
• phenomenon x is a result of the combination of __________, __________, and _________.

What to keep in mind as you draft an initial thesis statement

Beginning statements obtained through the methods illustrated above can serve as a framework for planning or drafting your paper, but remember they’re not yet the specific, argumentative thesis you want for the final version of your paper. In fact, in its first stages, a thesis statement usually is ill-formed or rough and serves only as a planning tool.

As you write, you may discover evidence that does not fit your temporary or “working” thesis. Or you may reach deeper insights about your topic as you do more research, and you will find that your thesis statement has to be more complicated to match the evidence that you want to use.

You must be willing to reject or omit some evidence in order to keep your paper cohesive and your reader focused. Or you may have to revise your thesis to match the evidence and insights that you want to discuss. Read your draft carefully, noting the conclusions you have drawn and the major ideas which support or prove those conclusions. These will be the elements of your final thesis statement.

Sometimes you will not be able to identify these elements in your early drafts, but as you consider how your argument is developing and how your evidence supports your main idea, ask yourself, “ What is the main point that I want to prove/discuss? ” and “ How will I convince the reader that this is true? ” When you can answer these questions, then you can begin to refine the thesis statement.

Refine and polish the thesis statement

To get to your final thesis, you’ll need to refine your draft thesis so that it’s specific and arguable.

• Ask if your draft thesis addresses the assignment
• Question each part of your draft thesis
• Clarify vague phrases and assertions
• Investigate alternatives to your draft thesis

Consult the example below for suggestions on how to refine your draft thesis statement.

Sample Assignment

Choose an activity and define it as a symbol of American culture. Your essay should cause the reader to think critically about the society which produces and enjoys that activity.

• Ask The phenomenon of drive-in facilities is an interesting symbol of american culture, and these facilities demonstrate significant characteristics of our society.This statement does not fulfill the assignment because it does not require the reader to think critically about society.

Drive-ins are an interesting symbol of American culture because they represent Americans’ significant creativity and business ingenuity.

Among the types of drive-in facilities familiar during the twentieth century, drive-in movie theaters best represent American creativity, not merely because they were the forerunner of later drive-ins and drive-throughs, but because of their impact on our culture: they changed our relationship to the automobile, changed the way people experienced movies, and changed movie-going into a family activity.

While drive-in facilities such as those at fast-food establishments, banks, pharmacies, and dry cleaners symbolize America’s economic ingenuity, they also have affected our personal standards.

While drive-in facilities such as those at fast- food restaurants, banks, pharmacies, and dry cleaners symbolize (1) Americans’ business ingenuity, they also have contributed (2) to an increasing homogenization of our culture, (3) a willingness to depersonalize relationships with others, and (4) a tendency to sacrifice quality for convenience.

This statement is now specific and fulfills all parts of the assignment. This version, like any good thesis, is not self-evident; its points, 1-4, will have to be proven with evidence in the body of the paper. The numbers in this statement indicate the order in which the points will be presented. Depending on the length of the paper, there could be one paragraph for each numbered item or there could be blocks of paragraph for even pages for each one.

Complete the final thesis statement

The bottom line.

As you move through the process of crafting a thesis, you’ll need to remember four things:

• Context matters! Think about your course materials and lectures. Try to relate your thesis to the ideas your instructor is discussing.
• As you go through the process described in this section, always keep your assignment in mind . You will be more successful when your thesis (and paper) responds to the assignment than if it argues a semi-related idea.
• Your thesis statement should be precise, focused, and contestable ; it should predict the sub-theses or blocks of information that you will use to prove your argument.
• Make sure that you keep the rest of your paper in mind at all times. Change your thesis as your paper evolves, because you do not want your thesis to promise more than your paper actually delivers.

In the beginning, the thesis statement was a tool to help you sharpen your focus, limit material and establish the paper’s purpose. When your paper is finished, however, the thesis statement becomes a tool for your reader. It tells the reader what you have learned about your topic and what evidence led you to your conclusion. It keeps the reader on track–well able to understand and appreciate your argument.

Writing Process and Structure

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Getting Started with Your Paper

Interpreting Writing Assignments from Your Courses

Generating Ideas for

Creating an Argument

Thesis vs. Purpose Statements

Architecture of Arguments

Working with Sources

Quoting and Paraphrasing Sources

Using Literary Quotations

Citing Sources in Your Paper

Drafting Your Paper

Generating Ideas for Your Paper

Introductions

Paragraphing

Developing Strategic Transitions

Conclusions

Revising Your Paper

Peer Reviews

Reverse Outlines

Revising an Argumentative Paper

Revision Strategies for Longer Projects

Finishing Your Paper

Twelve Common Errors: An Editing Checklist

How to Proofread your Paper

Writing Collaboratively

Collaborative and Group Writing

The Essay: History and Definition

Attempts at Defining Slippery Literary Form

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

"One damned thing after another" is how Aldous Huxley described the essay: "a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything."

As definitions go, Huxley's is no more or less exact than Francis Bacon's "dispersed meditations," Samuel Johnson's "loose sally of the mind" or Edward Hoagland's "greased pig."

Since Montaigne adopted the term "essay" in the 16th century to describe his "attempts" at self-portrayal in prose , this slippery form has resisted any sort of precise, universal definition. But that won't an attempt to define the term in this brief article.

In the broadest sense, the term "essay" can refer to just about any short piece of nonfiction  -- an editorial, feature story, critical study, even an excerpt from a book. However, literary definitions of a genre are usually a bit fussier.

One way to start is to draw a distinction between articles , which are read primarily for the information they contain, and essays, in which the pleasure of reading takes precedence over the information in the text . Although handy, this loose division points chiefly to kinds of reading rather than to kinds of texts. So here are some other ways that the essay might be defined.

Standard definitions often stress the loose structure or apparent shapelessness of the essay. Johnson, for example, called the essay "an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly performance."

True, the writings of several well-known essayists ( William Hazlitt and Ralph Waldo Emerson , for instance, after the fashion of Montaigne) can be recognized by the casual nature of their explorations -- or "ramblings." But that's not to say that anything goes. Each of these essayists follows certain organizing principles of his own.

Oddly enough, critics haven't paid much attention to the principles of design actually employed by successful essayists. These principles are rarely formal patterns of organization , that is, the "modes of exposition" found in many composition textbooks. Instead, they might be described as patterns of thought -- progressions of a mind working out an idea.

Unfortunately, the customary divisions of the essay into opposing types --  formal and informal, impersonal and familiar  -- are also troublesome. Consider this suspiciously neat dividing line drawn by Michele Richman:

Post-Montaigne, the essay split into two distinct modalities: One remained informal, personal, intimate, relaxed, conversational and often humorous; the other, dogmatic, impersonal, systematic and expository .

The terms used here to qualify the term "essay" are convenient as a kind of critical shorthand, but they're imprecise at best and potentially contradictory. Informal can describe either the shape or the tone of the work -- or both. Personal refers to the stance of the essayist, conversational to the language of the piece, and expository to its content and aim. When the writings of particular essayists are studied carefully, Richman's "distinct modalities" grow increasingly vague.

But as fuzzy as these terms might be, the qualities of shape and personality, form and voice, are clearly integral to an understanding of the essay as an artful literary kind. 

Many of the terms used to characterize the essay -- personal, familiar, intimate, subjective, friendly, conversational -- represent efforts to identify the genre's most powerful organizing force: the rhetorical voice or projected character (or persona ) of the essayist.

In his study of Charles Lamb , Fred Randel observes that the "principal declared allegiance" of the essay is to "the experience of the essayistic voice." Similarly, British author Virginia Woolf has described this textual quality of personality or voice as "the essayist's most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool."

Similarly, at the beginning of "Walden, "  Henry David Thoreau reminds the reader that "it is ... always the first person that is speaking." Whether expressed directly or not, there's always an "I" in the essay -- a voice shaping the text and fashioning a role for the reader.

Fictional Qualities

The terms "voice" and "persona" are often used interchangeably to suggest the rhetorical nature of the essayist himself on the page. At times an author may consciously strike a pose or play a role. He can, as E.B. White confirms in his preface to "The Essays," "be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter." 

In "What I Think, What I Am," essayist Edward Hoagland points out that "the artful 'I' of an essay can be as chameleon as any narrator in fiction." Similar considerations of voice and persona lead Carl H. Klaus to conclude that the essay is "profoundly fictive":

It seems to convey the sense of human presence that is indisputably related to its author's deepest sense of self, but that is also a complex illusion of that self -- an enactment of it as if it were both in the process of thought and in the process of sharing the outcome of that thought with others.

But to acknowledge the fictional qualities of the essay isn't to deny its special status as nonfiction.

Reader's Role

A basic aspect of the relationship between a writer (or a writer's persona) and a reader (the implied audience ) is the presumption that what the essayist says is literally true. The difference between a short story, say, and an autobiographical essay  lies less in the narrative structure or the nature of the material than in the narrator's implied contract with the reader about the kind of truth being offered.

Under the terms of this contract, the essayist presents experience as it actually occurred -- as it occurred, that is, in the version by the essayist. The narrator of an essay, the editor George Dillon says, "attempts to convince the reader that its model of experience of the world is valid." 

In other words, the reader of an essay is called on to join in the making of meaning. And it's up to the reader to decide whether to play along. Viewed in this way, the drama of an essay might lie in the conflict between the conceptions of self and world that the reader brings to a text and the conceptions that the essayist tries to arouse.

At Last, a Definition—of Sorts

With these thoughts in mind, the essay might be defined as a short work of nonfiction, often artfully disordered and highly polished, in which an authorial voice invites an implied reader to accept as authentic a certain textual mode of experience.

Sure. But it's still a greased pig.

Sometimes the best way to learn exactly what an essay is -- is to read some great ones. You'll find more than 300 of them in this collection of  Classic British and American Essays and Speeches .

• What is a Familiar Essay in Composition?
• What Does "Persona" Mean?
• What Are the Different Types and Characteristics of Essays?
• What Is a Personal Essay (Personal Statement)?
• The Writer's Voice in Literature and Rhetoric
• Rhetorical Analysis Definition and Examples
• Point of View in Grammar and Composition
• What Is Colloquial Style or Language?
• What Is Literary Journalism?
• Definition and Examples of Formal Essays
• What Is Expository Writing?
• First-Person Point of View
• The Difference Between an Article and an Essay
• An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction
• Third-Person Point of View

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Writing Tutorial Services

How to write a thesis statement, what is a thesis statement.

Almost all of us—even if we don’t do it consciously—look early in an essay for a one- or two-sentence condensation of the argument or analysis that is to follow. We refer to that condensation as a thesis statement.

Why Should Your Essay Contain a Thesis Statement?

• to test your ideas by distilling them into a sentence or two
• to better organize and develop your argument
• to provide your reader with a “guide” to your argument

In general, your thesis statement will accomplish these goals if you think of the thesis as the answer to the question your paper explores.

How Can You Write a Good Thesis Statement?

Here are some helpful hints to get you started. You can either scroll down or select a link to a specific topic.

How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is Assigned How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is not Assigned How to Tell a Strong Thesis Statement from a Weak One

How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is Assigned

Almost all assignments, no matter how complicated, can be reduced to a single question. Your first step, then, is to distill the assignment into a specific question. For example, if your assignment is, “Write a report to the local school board explaining the potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class,” turn the request into a question like, “What are the potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class?” After you’ve chosen the question your essay will answer, compose one or two complete sentences answering that question.

Q: “What are the potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class?” A: “The potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class are . . .”

A: “Using computers in a fourth-grade class promises to improve . . .”

The answer to the question is the thesis statement for the essay.

[ Back to top ]

How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is not Assigned

Even if your assignment doesn’t ask a specific question, your thesis statement still needs to answer a question about the issue you’d like to explore. In this situation, your job is to figure out what question you’d like to write about.

A good thesis statement will usually include the following four attributes:

• take on a subject upon which reasonable people could disagree
• deal with a subject that can be adequately treated given the nature of the assignment
• express one main idea
• assert your conclusions about a subject

Let’s see how to generate a thesis statement for a social policy paper.

Brainstorm the topic . Let’s say that your class focuses upon the problems posed by changes in the dietary habits of Americans. You find that you are interested in the amount of sugar Americans consume.

You start out with a thesis statement like this:

Sugar consumption.

This fragment isn’t a thesis statement. Instead, it simply indicates a general subject. Furthermore, your reader doesn’t know what you want to say about sugar consumption.

Narrow the topic . Your readings about the topic, however, have led you to the conclusion that elementary school children are consuming far more sugar than is healthy.

You change your thesis to look like this:

Reducing sugar consumption by elementary school children.

This fragment not only announces your subject, but it focuses on one segment of the population: elementary school children. Furthermore, it raises a subject upon which reasonable people could disagree, because while most people might agree that children consume more sugar than they used to, not everyone would agree on what should be done or who should do it. You should note that this fragment is not a thesis statement because your reader doesn’t know your conclusions on the topic.

Take a position on the topic. After reflecting on the topic a little while longer, you decide that what you really want to say about this topic is that something should be done to reduce the amount of sugar these children consume.

You revise your thesis statement to look like this:

More attention should be paid to the food and beverage choices available to elementary school children.

This statement asserts your position, but the terms more attention and food and beverage choices are vague.

Use specific language . You decide to explain what you mean about food and beverage choices , so you write:

Experts estimate that half of elementary school children consume nine times the recommended daily allowance of sugar.

This statement is specific, but it isn’t a thesis. It merely reports a statistic instead of making an assertion.

Make an assertion based on clearly stated support. You finally revise your thesis statement one more time to look like this:

Because half of all American elementary school children consume nine times the recommended daily allowance of sugar, schools should be required to replace the beverages in soda machines with healthy alternatives.

Notice how the thesis answers the question, “What should be done to reduce sugar consumption by children, and who should do it?” When you started thinking about the paper, you may not have had a specific question in mind, but as you became more involved in the topic, your ideas became more specific. Your thesis changed to reflect your new insights.

How to Tell a Strong Thesis Statement from a Weak One

1. a strong thesis statement takes some sort of stand..

Remember that your thesis needs to show your conclusions about a subject. For example, if you are writing a paper for a class on fitness, you might be asked to choose a popular weight-loss product to evaluate. Here are two thesis statements:

There are some negative and positive aspects to the Banana Herb Tea Supplement.

This is a weak thesis statement. First, it fails to take a stand. Second, the phrase negative and positive aspects is vague.

Because Banana Herb Tea Supplement promotes rapid weight loss that results in the loss of muscle and lean body mass, it poses a potential danger to customers.

This is a strong thesis because it takes a stand, and because it's specific.

2. A strong thesis statement justifies discussion.

Your thesis should indicate the point of the discussion. If your assignment is to write a paper on kinship systems, using your own family as an example, you might come up with either of these two thesis statements:

My family is an extended family.

This is a weak thesis because it merely states an observation. Your reader won’t be able to tell the point of the statement, and will probably stop reading.

While most American families would view consanguineal marriage as a threat to the nuclear family structure, many Iranian families, like my own, believe that these marriages help reinforce kinship ties in an extended family.

This is a strong thesis because it shows how your experience contradicts a widely-accepted view. A good strategy for creating a strong thesis is to show that the topic is controversial. Readers will be interested in reading the rest of the essay to see how you support your point.

3. A strong thesis statement expresses one main idea.

Readers need to be able to see that your paper has one main point. If your thesis statement expresses more than one idea, then you might confuse your readers about the subject of your paper. For example:

Companies need to exploit the marketing potential of the Internet, and Web pages can provide both advertising and customer support.

This is a weak thesis statement because the reader can’t decide whether the paper is about marketing on the Internet or Web pages. To revise the thesis, the relationship between the two ideas needs to become more clear. One way to revise the thesis would be to write:

Because the Internet is filled with tremendous marketing potential, companies should exploit this potential by using Web pages that offer both advertising and customer support.

This is a strong thesis because it shows that the two ideas are related. Hint: a great many clear and engaging thesis statements contain words like because , since , so , although , unless , and however .

4. A strong thesis statement is specific.

A thesis statement should show exactly what your paper will be about, and will help you keep your paper to a manageable topic. For example, if you're writing a seven-to-ten page paper on hunger, you might say:

World hunger has many causes and effects.

This is a weak thesis statement for two major reasons. First, world hunger can’t be discussed thoroughly in seven to ten pages. Second, many causes and effects is vague. You should be able to identify specific causes and effects. A revised thesis might look like this:

Hunger persists in Glandelinia because jobs are scarce and farming in the infertile soil is rarely profitable.

This is a strong thesis statement because it narrows the subject to a more specific and manageable topic, and it also identifies the specific causes for the existence of hunger.

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Samuel Johnson's Essays

~ republished 260 years later.

No. 103. Horrour of the last.

05 Saturday Apr 1760

Posted by Samuel Johnson in The Idler

≈ Comments Off on No. 103. Horrour of the last.

Respicere ad longae jussit spatia ultima vitae . JUV. Sat. x. 275.

Much of the pain and pleasure of mankind arises from the conjectures which every one makes of the thoughts of others; we all enjoy praise which we do not hear, and resent contempt which we do not see. The Idler may, therefore, be forgiven, if he suffers his imagination to represent to him what his readers will say or think when they are informed that they have now his last paper in their hands.

Value is more frequently raised by scarcity than by use. That which lay neglected when it was common, rises in estimation as its quantity becomes less. We seldom learn the true want of what we have till it is discovered that we can have no more.

This essay will, perhaps, be read with care even by those who have not yet attended to any other; and he that finds this late attention recompensed, will not forbear to wish that he had bestowed it sooner.

Though the Idler and his readers have contracted no close friendship, they are, perhaps, both unwilling to part. There are few things not purely evil, of which we can say, without some emotion of uneasiness, this is the last . Those who never could agree together, shed tears when mutual discontent has determined them to final separation; of a place which has been frequently visited, though without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness of heart; and the Idler, with all his chilness of tranquillity, is not wholly unaffected by the thought that his last essay is now before him.

The secret horrour of the last is inseparable from a thinking being, whose life is limited, and to whom death is dreadful. We always make a secret comparison between a part and the whole; the termination of any period of life reminds us that life itself has likewise its termination; when we have done any thing for the last time, we involuntarily reflect that a part of the days allotted us is past, and that as more is past there is less remaining.

It is very happily and kindly provided, that in every life there are certain pauses and interruptions, which force consideration upon the careless, and seriousness upon the light; points of time where one course of action ends, and another begins; and by vicissitudes of fortune or alteration of employment, by change of place or loss of friendship, we are forced to say of something, this is the last .

An even and unvaried tenour of life always hides from our apprehension the approach of its end. Succession is not perceived but by variation; he that lives to-day as he lived yesterday, and expects that, as the present day is, such will be the morrow, easily conceives time as running in a circle and returning to itself. The uncertainty of our duration is impressed commonly by dissimilitude of condition; it is only by finding life changeable that we are reminded of its shortness.

This conviction, however forcible at every new impression, is every moment fading from the mind; and partly by the inevitable incursion of new images, and partly by voluntary exclusion of unwelcome thoughts, we are again exposed to the universal fallacy; and we must do another thing for the last time, before we consider that the time is nigh when we shall do no more.

As the last Idler is published in that solemn week which the Christian world has always set apart for the examination of the conscience, the review of life, the extinction of earthly desires, and the renovation of holy purposes; I hope that my readers are already disposed to view every incident with seriousness, and improve it by meditation; and that, when they see this series of trifles brought to a conclusion, they will consider that, by out-living the Idler, they have passed weeks, months and years, which are now no longer in their power; that an end must in time be put to every thing great as to every thing little; that to life must come its last hour, and to this system of being its last day, the hour at which probation ceases, and repentance will be vain; the day in which every work of the hand, and imagination of the heart shall be brought to judgment, and an everlasting futurity shall be determined by the past.

Read previous articles

No. 102. authors inattentive to themselves..

This is the reason why almost every one wishes to quit his employment; he does not like another state, but is disgusted with his own.

No. 101. Omar’s plan of life.

Terrestrial happiness is of short continuance. The brightness of the flame is wasting its fuel; the fragrant flower is passing away in its own odors.

No. 100. The good sort of woman

I lived in a state of celibacy beyond the usual time.

No. 99. Ortogrul of Basra.

Surely, said he to himself, this palace is the seat of happiness, where pleasure succeeds to pleasure, and discontent and sorrow can have no admission.

No. 98. Sophia Heedful.

But, though disappointed in my expectations, I do not despair.

No. 97. Narratives of travellers considered.

It may, I think, be justly observed, that few books disappoint their readers more than the narrations of travellers.

No. 96. Hacho of Lapland.

Hacho, a king of Lapland, was in his youth the most renowned of the Northern warriors.

No. 95. Tim Wainscot’s son a fine gentleman.

All this is very provoking; and yet all this might be borne, if the boy could support his pretensions.

No. 94. Obstructions of learning.

That those who profess to advance learning sometimes obstruct it, cannot be denied; the continual multiplication of books disappoints inquiry.

No. 93. Sam Softly’s history.

Sam Softly was bred a sugar-baker; but succeeding to a considerable estate on the death of his elder brother, he retired early from business.

While Sandel argues that pursuing perfection through genetic engineering would decrease our sense of humility, he claims that the sense of solidarity we would lose is also important.

This thesis summarizes several points in Sandel’s argument, but it does not make a claim about how we should understand his argument. A reader who read Sandel’s argument would not also need to read an essay based on this descriptive thesis.  

Broad thesis (arguable, but difficult to support with evidence) 

Michael Sandel’s arguments about genetic engineering do not take into consideration all the relevant issues.

This is an arguable claim because it would be possible to argue against it by saying that Michael Sandel’s arguments do take all of the relevant issues into consideration. But the claim is too broad. Because the thesis does not specify which “issues” it is focused on—or why it matters if they are considered—readers won’t know what the rest of the essay will argue, and the writer won’t know what to focus on. If there is a particular issue that Sandel does not address, then a more specific version of the thesis would include that issue—hand an explanation of why it is important.  

Arguable thesis with analytical claim 

While Sandel argues persuasively that our instinct to “remake” (54) ourselves into something ever more perfect is a problem, his belief that we can always draw a line between what is medically necessary and what makes us simply “better than well” (51) is less convincing.

This is an arguable analytical claim. To argue for this claim, the essay writer will need to show how evidence from the article itself points to this interpretation. It’s also a reasonable scope for a thesis because it can be supported with evidence available in the text and is neither too broad nor too narrow.  

Arguable thesis with normative claim 

Given Sandel’s argument against genetic enhancement, we should not allow parents to decide on using Human Growth Hormone for their children.

This thesis tells us what we should do about a particular issue discussed in Sandel’s article, but it does not tell us how we should understand Sandel’s argument.  

Questions to ask about your thesis 

• Is the thesis truly arguable? Does it speak to a genuine dilemma in the source, or would most readers automatically agree with it?  
• Is the thesis too obvious? Again, would most or all readers agree with it without needing to see your argument?  
• Is the thesis complex enough to require a whole essay's worth of argument?  
• Is the thesis supportable with evidence from the text rather than with generalizations or outside research?  
• Would anyone want to read a paper in which this thesis was developed? That is, can you explain what this paper is adding to our understanding of a problem, question, or topic?
• picture_as_pdf Thesis

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Richard Squibbs is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago and author of Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay (Palgrave, 2014). While he continues to publish articles on the British and early American periodical essay, he is also completing a monograph that explores the messy entanglements of picaresque fiction and the early English novel.

• Published: 20 October 2022
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This chapter examines Johnson’s achievements as an essayist in relation to the established conventions of the periodical essay. With the Rambler , Johnson restored the periodical essay to its once-prominent place in English literary culture by elevating its moral seriousness and emphasizing its aptness as a vehicle for literary criticism. The success of the series spurred a revival of the genre at mid-century, albeit largely in reaction to the Rambler ’s relative gravity and ponderous diction. After doubling down on the Rambler ’s style with his contributions to the Adventurer , Johnson experimented with a more playful approach to the periodical essay in the Idler . The mixed critical reception of his efforts near the end of the century often associated his essays more with the moralist and critic Johnson had become than with the genre in which he first enjoyed popular success, an enduring perspective that this chapter aims to qualify.

What must Johnson have made of Oliver Goldsmith’s “resverie” in his short-lived periodical the Bee (1759), wherein the gruff coachman of “ The fame machine ” refuses Johnson a seat for his Dictionary but relents immediately upon realizing that this “very grave personage” is the author of the Rambler ? 1 To a writer who had striven for fame since arriving in London over twenty years before, such praise from a stranger was no doubt gratifying (Johnson and Goldsmith wouldn’t first meet for another eighteen months). And it might have boosted his morale as he toiled away at the Idler in the wake of terrible personal and financial setbacks, while still procrastinating on his long-delayed edition of Shakespeare. But while collected editions of the Rambler had sold moderately well by the time Goldsmith hailed it, Johnson may have been bemused nonetheless to see his literary immortality staked on his periodical essays rather than his monumental contribution to fixing the English language.

On the other hand, the relatively minor genre of the periodical essay seems to have appealed to Johnson because no one since its great originators, Addison and Steele, had managed to find enduring success in it. In the thirty-five years between the end of the Spectator and the first number of the Rambler , roughly three dozen essay series modeled on the Tatler , Spectator , and Guardian had appeared in London. Of these, only three titles were issued in collected editions more than three times; and even then, only the most recent, the Female Spectator (1744–6), would see an edition in print beyond the 1740s. 2 Meanwhile, new collected editions of Addison’s and Steele’s series continued to appear regularly every few years, with the latest brought out in 1749–50. Johnson’s aim was therefore to succeed in writing essays that would not just momentarily captivate the public but stand “the test of a long trial” like those of his great predecessors (Boswell, Life , vol. i, 201). And in this he half-succeeded. For while the Rambler ’s original periodical readership was small, the collected essays enjoyed a thriving afterlife as “classicks” for roughly seventy years, until English literary taste had changed sufficiently to make the rigor and religiosity of Johnson’s moralizing seem outmoded and dull. Goldsmith, then, was half-right too. Posterity indeed still remembers the Rambler , but only as the lesser writing of Dictionary Johnson.

From the vantage of 1759, however, Johnson’s single-handed restoration of the periodical essay to literary prominence was remarkable not just for the Rambler itself, but for stimulating a brief but prolific revival of the genre after more than three decades of mediocre iterations. The Rambler ’s ruminative style, generalizing philosophy, and sober self-criticism stripped the approach of Addison’s and Steele’s essays to what Johnson conceived as the genre’s bare rhetorical essence. Instead of recording the foibles of the Town in their time-bound details, he sought to abstract from them general principles of right and wrong conduct. When three major collections of periodical essays—James Harrison’s British Classicks (1786), J. Parsons’s Select British Classics (1793), and Alexander Chalmers’s British Essayists (1803)—canonized the genre at the end of the eighteenth century, all skipped straight from the Guardian to the Rambler and those series which immediately followed it. Nathan Drake, too, structured his five-volume history of the genre (1805, 1809) around these same high-water marks. But where Johnson looked to the Spectator as an inspiring example of how diurnal essays could live on into posterity, most essayists writing in the wake of the Rambler pointedly rejected Johnson’s religious seriousness and heavy-handed style. So even in the one literary genre in which Johnson was demonstrably influential, his example was mostly a negative one—fitting for such a dogged contrarian.

The Periodical Essay

The Rambler today is best known for its moral and intellectual rigor and elevated diction: a totemic expression of the older Johnson made familiar by Boswell. Among students of the eighteenth century who are not Johnsonians, roughly five essays have come to stand in for the series as a whole: Rambler 4 (on the novel), 5 (on Spring), 12 (on a young woman come to London for service), 60 (on biography), and 155 (on the danger of habits). In this, the Rambler has shared the fate of the Spectator , whose 635 essays are typically represented by the eight or so that are most often anthologized. But in the Spectator ’s case, we read them because of the ratified historical impact they had in constituting the modern public sphere and its characteristic print media. In the case of the Rambler , we read them because Boswell’s Johnson wrote them. Their difference from other periodical essays, in other words, is what marks them as Johnson’s and makes them worth reading. Taken as a whole, however, the Rambler offers insight not just into the literary development of Johnson’s characteristic philosophical tough-mindedness, but into a generic conception of the periodical essay that has been mostly lost to literary history.

As Boswell notes, Johnson undertook the Rambler to remedy a conspicuous absence in the publishing world of mid-century London: no essay series of comparable scope, moral intent, or literary and intellectual quality had appeared since the Spectator ’s last volume of 1714. So much time had elapsed, and so many inferior imitations had come and gone, in fact, that he believed such a publication would “have the advantage of novelty” ( Life , vol. i, 201). The Rambler ’s wordy, at times ponderous, style was certainly novel for the genre and much remarked upon (Boswell’s defense of it, comparing the acquired taste of Johnson’s harder “liquor of more body” to Addison’s instantly pleasing “light wine,” is among his most apt similes—even if he seems to have taken it from Johnson himself: Life , vol. i, 224). 3 And against the expectations of the title, Rambler essays tend to reek of the closed air of the study rather than sparkle with the liveliness of the town as had the Tatler and Spectator . This was deliberate, as Johnson found Steele’s essays wanting for “being mere Observations on Life and Manners without a sufficiency of solid Learning acquired from Books” (Boswell, Life , vol. i, 215). Instead of recording and reflecting on the minutiae of London life with such compelling style that his essays might eventually claim the notice of posterity, Johnson used the winnowing force of his intellect and rhetoric immediately to retrieve kernels of universal truth from the disposable husks of everyday situations. This made the Rambler responsive more to Johnson’s sense of what should always matter than to the comparatively petty matters of the day.

Johnson’s account of the Spectator ’s achievement in the Life of Addison offers crucial insight into this revisionist conception of the periodical essay. John Gay’s “Present State of Wit” (1711), the first extensive account of the new genre, provided the template, which Johnson would fill out with a deeper sense of literary history. Gay had marveled at how the Tatler dared “to tell the Town”—twice weekly—“that they were a parcel of Fops, Fools, and vain Cocquets” yet managed to reform readers’ behavior because it did so with such panache. 4 “’Tis incredible to conceive the effect his Writings have had on the Town,” Gay goes on; “How many Thousand follies they have either quite banish’d, or given a very great check to” while having “set all our Wit and Men of Letters upon a new way of Thinking” ( Poetry and Prose , vol. ii, 452). Though Town manners had started to backslide once the Tatler ceased publishing, Gay held out great hope for the newly published Spectator , whose “Spirit and Stile” and “Prodigious … Run of Wit and Learning” promises similarly great things (455). Johnson, too, praises the Tatler and Spectator for supplying “cooler and more inoffensive reflections” to “minds heated with political contest” by the newssheets of the day, noting that these essays “had a perceptible influence upon the conversation of that time, and taught the frolick and the gay to unite merriment with decency” (Yale Works , vol. xxii, 614). One can hear echoes of this account in Habermas’s still-influential theory of how the first English periodicals helped create modern public culture in Queen Anne’s London. Yet Johnson also situates this new form of print media in a longer history of European literature in ways that implicitly explain his manner of proceeding in the Rambler .

The Rambler was, in some ways, a throwback. But to what exactly? Boswell sought to explain and ennoble the Rambler ’s characteristic ponderousness by giving it a distinguished national pedigree. The rigor of Johnson’s style, he claimed, harks back to “the great writers of the last century, Hooker, Bacon, Sanderson, Hakewell, and others,” like Sir William Temple and Sir Thomas Browne ( Life , vol. i, 219, 221). By the time Boswell wrote this, the Rambler had become a “classic” of the English essay tradition, known to many more readers as handsomely bound volumes than it ever had been in periodical form; it had taken its rightful place, shelved alongside the tomes of early modern England’s hardest and most serious thinkers. The Rambler ’s original periodicity appears, from this vantage, incidental to its universal character and worth. Johnson’s own account of the periodical essay, however, emphasizes the genre’s complex, and necessary, engagement with its own moment. He also gives it a deep transnational pedigree, citing “Casa in his book of Manners , and Castiglione in his Courtier ” as key precedents for the Tatler ’s and Spectator ’s common mission to reform “the unsettled practice of daily intercourse by propriety and politeness” (Yale Works , vol. xxii, 614). But Johnson notes, too, that these English serials bear the influence of the popular Caractères (1688) of Jean de La Bruyère. This collection of satiric portraits of courtiers and citizens during the reign of Louis XIV “exhibited the “Characters and Manners of the Age” so engagingly and with such “justness of observation” that new French and English editions continued to be issued and read, long after the society, whose foibles La Bruyère skewered, had ceased to be (vol. xxii, 614, 612). By so successfully bridging the gap between timely moral writing and the regard of posterity, the Caractères in Johnson’s view provides a model to which authors of popular moral essays should aspire. The distinctively English innovation was to use the nation’s notorious public appetite for news and controversy, and the teeming print media which fed it, as a means of mass social and cultural improvement. 5

The Form of the Rambler

This potted history might suggest that Johnson wasn’t much concerned with the periodical essay’s formal dimensions, but the format he chose for the Rambler indicates otherwise. The Caractères in The Life of Addison appears not only as a conceptual bridge between present and future, but also formally as one between the Italian conduct books and the Spectator . While Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Book of the Courtier) (1528) is a collection of dialogues and Casa’s Galateo (A Treatise on Politeness) (1558) a monologic discourse, the Caractères is a miscellaneous collection of essays, moral reflections, and character sketches that manage to compel despite being “written without connection” (Yale Works , vol. xxii, 612). La Bruyère’s book, in a way, represents what would become the end of the publishing trajectory of the English periodical essay, as formerly weekly (or biweekly, or even daily) sheets responding to matters of the moment were collected in volumes and reprinted as morally, if not thematically, consistent wholes. The numerous sections of the Caractères , however, never circulated individually. In Johnson’s view, this may have hindered the work’s effectiveness, for writing that attempts to reform its readers’ morals and manners must be adapted formally to its intended sphere of action. Johnson notes that while English readers have long “had many books to teach us our more important duties,” before the Tatler and Spectator no literary works had appositely engaged the comparatively minor “track of daily conversation” that required for its reformation “the frequent publication of short papers, which we read not as study, but amusement” (vol. xxii, 613). The dignity of the form (minor though it may be) lies in its self-sufficiency: regularly circulated folio half-sheets act as a material bulwark of common sense against the flood of newssheets and controversial tracts “agitating the nation” (vol. xxii, 614). This was the original format of the periodical essay, to which Johnson deliberately returned with the Rambler .

Between the final number of the Spectator and the first of the Rambler , essay serials had appeared much more frequently as columns amidst the miscellaneous matter in magazines and newspapers than as individually published sheets. Many of these, like Lewis Theobald’s Censor , first published in Mist’s Journal (1715–17), were later brought out in collected editions to assert their enduring value apart from their original, evidently ephemeral, publication media. Such was the assumed cachet of the single-sheet essay that the preface to the Humourist (1720) claimed that its initial popularity when the essays had “appear’d Abroad singly” warranted this collected volume, though there’s no indication that the Humourist had ever circulated as individual sheets (1720, [xxxi]). 6 The folio half-sheet, according to Spectator 10, helped focus the mind amidst the myriad distractions of London and its teeming “publick Prints.” 7 The double-column printing of the Spectator ’s sheets, moreover, slyly mimicked the form of the standard early eighteenth-century newssheet in order to confound readers’ expectations when, instead of finding the usual miscellaneous material therein, they’d discover a single, sustained topic for reflection. By taking just the “Quarter of an Hour” required to read one of these essays each morning, London’s citizens could then apply the “sound and wholesome Sentiments” they contained to their daily experiences around town ( Spectator , vol. i, 47, 46). Johnson, as a former editor and miscellaneous writer for the Gentleman’s Magazine , recognized how essential this self-contained format was to the focusing aims of the periodical essay and refined it further to emphasize the genre’s inherent dignity. Each Rambler essay was printed in single columns across three half-sheets to make it stand out even more from other periodicals. The series was also the first printed without advertisements, and with sequential page numbering to encourage readers to keep and bind them in order. These changes materially reflect Johnson’s posterity-oriented conception of the periodical essay and would shortly be adopted by series like the Adventurer (1752–4), the World (1753–6), the Connoisseur (1754–6), the Mirror (1779–80), and the Lounger (1785–7). To write essays for the present was, for Johnson and his immediate successors, also to write for the edification of readers in an extensive, unknowable future.

The Topicality of the Rambler

While these formal departures indicate Johnson’s desire to elevate the Rambler above everyday pettiness and commercial concerns, the essays themselves were not unconcerned with matters of the moment. James Woodruff has shown how Johnson’s original readers would have easily grasped the topical relevance of a number of Rambler essays whose contemporary context is not immediately evident to us. Using London newspapers as his guide, Woodruff connects several essays on the problematic effects of sudden riches, and one on the force of chance in human affairs, to the public mania generated by the State Lottery drawing of 1751. 8   Rambler 107 (March 26, 1751) refers directly to the imminent shift in Britain from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar; the taxonomy in Rambler 144 of various types of pernicious detractors appeared amidst several cases of public reputation-trashing; the warning in Rambler 149 against prematurely condemning suspects of criminal acts followed on the heels of a widely reported instance of mob justice; and no. 148, dealing with “parental tyranny,” was published in the wake of news reports concerning multiple acts of parricide and filicide. 9 Besides these, the Rambler features recurring seasonal reflections; meditations during religious holidays; and critical essays on biography, history, prose fiction, and poetry which seem prompted by recent publications. Though Johnson would boast in the Rambler ’s final number that he had “never complied with temporary curiosity, nor enabled [his] readers to discuss the topick of the day” (Yale Works , vol. v, 316), this was true only in the most reductive sense. Research like Woodruff’s demonstrates how Johnson regularly aligned the Rambler ’s philosophical inquiries with topics of great public interest to demonstrate, by implication, how readers might come to recognize general or universal patterns of conduct (or moral truth) in what might otherwise appear passing matters of media-driven concern.

This Johnsonian impulse to reveal the enduring substance beneath superficial appearances informs the Rambler ’s signature rhetorical style as well. The contrast with the Spectator illuminates how each series models, in its essayistic form, different conceptions of how readers should engage with the world. A typical Spectator essay will declare its proposition concerning human character and conduct, and then move through a number of particular instances that demonstrate the validity of that proposition. “The most improper things we commit in the Conduct of our Lives, we are led into by the Force of Fashion,” begins Spectator 64. “Instances may be given, in which a prevailing Custom makes us act against the Rules of Nature, Law, and common Sense,” Mr. Spectator continues, “but at present I shall confine my Consideration of the Effect it has upon Men’s Minds, by looking into our Behaviour when it is the Fashion to go into Mourning.” Following an account of the history of courtly mourning rituals, the essay concludes by pointing out how absurd it is for the general public to adopt such rituals to mourn foreign princes with whom they have no connection, not least because the mass shift to mourning garb leaves domestic clothiers “pinched with present Want” for the period’s duration. The essay’s arch tone and wry depiction of the “wholesale Dealer in Silks and Ribbons,” who dreads the death of any “foreign Potentate” because of how this fashionable “Folly” will impact his bottom line, reinforce the worldliness of its moralizing ( Spectator , vol. i, 275–7). This pattern—followed throughout the Spectator —formally enacts the ideal process by which readers should mull over the general moral or philosophical points the essays raise as they encounter representative instances of them in their daily business around the Town and City.

The Rambler likewise matches its rhetoric to its aims, but with a key difference. Whereas the Spectator adduces worldly particulars to bear out its nuggets of general wisdom, Rambler essays often take circuitous tours from moral generalities through particular exceptions to these general rules, before returning to modified reaffirmations of these essays’ original propositions. “The heart of Johnson’s mission as a moralist,” according to Leopold Damrosch, “is to make us stop parroting the precepts of moralists and start thinking for ourselves” (81). The movement Damrosch describes from received precepts to the reader’s thoughtful reconsideration of them highlights individual moral agency to a greater degree than the more sociable ethos expressed (and modeled) throughout the Tatler and Spectator . Mark E. Wildermuth’s consideration of the religious dimensions of Johnson’s style in the Rambler likewise points to the series’ primary focus on individual moral and intellectual development. Each essay aims, he notes, “to expand our moral consciousness by prompting us to consider different kinds of perspectives, the human and the divine, the relative and the absolute, in order more fully to comprehend the spiritual and ethical significance of our behavior” (229). The rhetorical pattern Johnson used to try to catalyze this new comprehension is remarkably consistent throughout: over half of the Rambler ’s 208 essays (114, to be exact) begin by asserting a general idea or precept, which is then subjected to minute inquiry to ascertain just how far it applies to the vagaries of human experience. Of the remaining ninety-four essays, sixty-five are epistles from fictitious readers, with the rest comprising literary criticism (mostly of Milton’s verse and the folly of pastoralism) and Eastern tales—and even many of these essays revolve around common assumptions which Johnson proceeds to question. Whereas Addison and Steele primarily sought to make their readers better, more thoughtful citizens, Johnson wants his readers to adjust their expectations, and come to self-understanding, via a rational, gently skeptical, Christian morality. Only thus prepared, the Rambler insists, can readers fortify themselves against the fashionable caprices and material temptations of a superficial world.

The Religiosity of the Rambler

Johnson’s critical concern with the power of inherited opinion is unique in the history of the British periodical essay. The Rambler ’s musings often proceed either from a universal principle identified by one of the ancients (Cicero or Horace, usually) or from a long-held belief with which most would automatically agree. Over 20 percent of the essays, in fact, begin with some variant of the formulation “It has long been observed …” (Yale Works , vol. iv, 92), or “Nothing has been longer observed …” (vol. v, 172). This pattern, along with the wandering quality of the essays’ ruminations, speaks to Johnson’s intent to lay bare for readers how they might critically examine the validity of truisms and adapt them to more productive uses. Rambler 29, for instance, begins by asserting that “There is nothing recommended with greater frequency among the gayer poets of antiquity, than the secure possession of the present hour, and the dismission of all the cares which intrude upon our quiet” and ends with the Christian moral that “if we neglect the duties” of the present “to make provision against visionary attacks, we shall certainly counteract our own purpose” (vol. iii, 158–62). In a movement typical of the series, a pagan carpe diem ethos is surprisingly transformed, via a process of rational sifting and refinement, into a call to live a virtuous Christian life. Following ancient sensualist practice is, of course, absurd for those living with the benefits of Christianity, Johnson avers; yet “the incitements to pleasure are, in these authors, generally mingled with such reflections upon life, as well deserve to be considered distinctly from the purposes for which they are produced.” The essay then moves through arguments concerning the paralytic effects of an “idle and thoughtless resignation to chance”; the reason why “a wise man is not amazed at sudden occurrences” (because he “never considered things not yet existing as the proper objects of his attention,” not because he has special insight into “futurity”); and how the traditional moralists’ check to “the swellings of vain hope by representations of the innumerable casualties to which life is subject” can work equally well as “an antidote to fear” of the unknown by reinforcing just how much of life exceeds our control. It ends by musing on how indulging imaginary fears prevents us from recognizing that every moment offers opportunities for the work of moral improvement, the only real route to “human happiness”—a conception of the good, and of the means of attaining it, far afield from the essay’s opening precept. But the essential point—that worrying about an unknowable future prevents us from living the good life, however we conceive it—abides through all the philosophical and religious transmutations to which Johnson rigorously subjects it.

The Rambler ’s method of testing and qualifying received moral wisdom is brought to bear on even the hoariest sentiments, such as the universality of the “wish for riches.” Rambler 131 (Yale Works , vol. iv, 331–5) begins by affirming that “Wealth is the general center of inclination, the point to which all minds preserve an invariable tendency.” There’s good reason for this, as “No desire can be formed which riches do not assist or gratify”; and it follows that since wealth is the surest means to gratification, the temptation to acquire it via “subtilty and dishonesty” is nearly as universal as the desire for wealth itself. After several paragraphs detailing the social ramifications of this problem (general unease, endemic fraud, the unfortunate “punctilious minuteness” of contracts), the essay concludes by facing up to the stubborn fact of inequality, which exacerbates the universal desire for riches. While we might pine for a lost “golden age” and its “community of possessions,” Johnson posits, it has vanished forever along with the “spontaneity of production” which made it possible. For production has long since depended on labor, and in spite of the “multitudes” who “strive to pluck the fruit without cultivating the tree,” “property” rightfully accrues to those who work for it. Readers determined not to resort to fraud, nor to take “vows of perpetual poverty” (which Johnson dismisses as an unproductive escape into “inactivity and uselessness”), are left with one course of action: to embrace “riches” as a means “necessary to present convenience” while adhering rigorously to “justice, veracity, and piety” in the pursuit and use of them. The intellectual loop Johnson runs here, like that of Rambler 29 and so many others, takes readers from an inherited truism, through a variety of instances which account for and test it, and back to the original proposition seen anew from the solid, common-sense grounding of basic Christian morality. It’s a form of baptism-by-argument, plunging readers into the fluid medium of worldly knowledge illuminated by Christian piety, from which they emerge with new perspectives on themselves, and their moral-cultural inheritance.

The Adventurer and the Universal Chronicle

The Rambler ’s pervasive religiosity, however moderated by the genre’s customary worldliness, is new to the periodical essay. While subsequent series like the World , the Connoisseur , and the Lounger would revert to the less religious, topical-satiric mode associated with the Tatler and Spectator , the next significant London half-sheet essay periodical the Adventurer (1752–4) carried on the religious turn—not surprisingly, given that Johnson wrote for it. Started by John Hawkesworth, who had succeeded Johnson as parliamentary reporter for the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1744 and would go on to literary fame for his edition of Swift’s works (1765–6) and The Three Voyages of Captain Cook (1773–84), the series was also brought out by John Payne, the Rambler ’s publisher. Johnson wrote roughly a quarter of its 140 numbers, as did Joseph Warton; Hawkesworth was responsible for most of the rest, with assistance on a few papers from Bonnell Thornton (who would shortly begin the Connoisseur with George Coleman) and several others—all anonymously. According to Payne, the Adventurer ’s “ultimate design … [was] to promote the practice of piety and virtue upon the principles of Christianity; yet in such a manner that they for whose benefit it is chiefly intended may not be tempted to throw it aside”: in other words, to do what the Rambler did. 10 And it succeeded, for the Adventurer initially outsold the Rambler in both its original sheets and its first folio and duodecimo editions. The series followed its predecessor, too, in presenting itself—even more explicitly—as a collection designed with posterity in mind. A note at the end of the Adventurer ’s first essay informed readers that “These Numbers will be formed into regular Volumes, to each of which will be printed a Title, a Table of Contents, and a Translation of the Mottos and Quotations”; another at the bottom of no. 70 reads “End of the First Volume”; and the last essay notes that “when [the Adventurer ] was first planned, it was determined, that, whatever might be the success, it should not be continued as a paper, till it became unwieldy as a book.” 11 Though now known only to the most devoted eighteenth-century specialist (and even then only for the twenty-nine essays Johnson had anonymously authored), editions of the Adventurer were reprinted nearly as often as those of the Rambler through the 1790s. 12 The explicit religiosity of both, however, remained unique; only the Looker-On (1792–3), a half-sheet essay series which later marshaled Christian piety against the immediate threat of Jacobin infidelity, would work in a similar vein.

Even as Johnson can claim to have revived the periodical essay with the Rambler , the mid-century literary marketplace remained a difficult environment for such ventures. The World and Connoisseur were singularly successful, publishing as weekly sheets for four and nearly three years, respectively, but the rest of the essay series that followed the Adventurer were either short-lived or first appeared as columns in magazines and reviews, and then quickly forgotten. Johnson, too, capitulated to the realities of the market and published the Idler in the Universal Chronicle , a weekly review that appeared every Saturday from April 15, 1758 to April 5, 1760. The details of Johnson’s involvement in the paper beyond writing the Idler are murky, but Payne published the first thirty numbers, after which the Chronicle underwent two changes in publishing arrangements until it finally folded with its 104th number. Each issue ran eight pages, printed in three columns, and began with an Idler essay. Highlights from the week’s news culled from other papers followed, mostly centered on London, though coverage of events in Scotland, Ireland, and foreign countries featured as well, along with poems and political essays, and advertisements (which appeared regularly after Payne gave up the paper). While the Chronicle struggled to find readers, a number of Idler essays were widely reprinted in other newspapers and magazines during the paper’s run; and volumes of the series were brought out over a dozen times through the end of the century, in addition to being included in Harrison’s and Parsons’s collections of “classicks.” So the Idler was another measured success for Johnson in this genre.

Critically, the Idler has been treated as an afterthought. Walter Jackson Bate’s remark that “the confirmed Johnsonian finds them thin” (Yale Works , vol. ii, xix) has colored reception of the essays ever since, to the extent that while the Rambler ’s critical bibliography runs to over fifty published entries, there are only seven article-length studies devoted to the Idler . 13 An unconfirmed Johnsonian, however, can discern in the Idler ’s lighter touch and more consistent engagement with Town life Johnson’s purposeful return to the established conventions of the periodical essay. Like the Rambler , the Idler features literary criticism, Eastern tales, and general moral reflections. Since Idler essays are shorter, the critical pieces mostly focus on broad evaluative principles instead of meticulously analyzing verse structure as in the Rambler ’s Milton essays. The Idler ’s early numbers also deal explicitly with current events, the series having begun nearly two years into the Seven Years’ War (essays 5 through 8 concern the war, a topical focus nowhere evident in the Rambler ). Bate argues that while this topical turn indicates that Johnson initially wanted to distinguish the new series from its predecessor, the Idler ’s reversion in later numbers to universal subjects and literary criticism suggests that Johnson found it easier in the end to rely on the approach he had pioneered in the Rambler . Given Johnson’s habitual indolence and pressure to continue working on his Shakespeare edition, this seems plausible. But the pervasive differences between the two series imply that Johnson wanted to explore a side of the genre that he had de-emphasized in the Rambler .

Though it lacks the Rambler ’s analytical rigor, the Idler translates its predecessor’s concern with self-scrutiny into a more humorous, workaday idiom. Between the Adventurer ’s last and the Idler ’s first number, the World and the Connoisseur had infused the periodical essay with a sharper sense of irony and satire. Both series present a London public marked by shallow and materialistic self-absorption that, especially in the Connoisseur , reflects the failure of the Spectator and other periodical essays to make good on the genre’s promise to create thoughtful, reflective citizens. 14 The gleeful irreverence with which they skewered the pretentions of Town life, though far afield from the pious sobriety we associate with the Rambler , seems to have registered with Johnson as he embarked on his final essay series, which is indeed marked by a greater “satiric impulse” (O’Flaherty, “Johnson’s Idler ,” 213). But the Idler ’s gentle satires of ordinary foibles suggest that Johnson strove to mitigate the barbed severity of the World and Connoisseur by restoring to the periodical essay the more tolerant and sociable tenor of Addison’s and Steele’s work.

The Idler ’s worldview is thus narrower and less historically extensive than the Rambler ’s. Whereas Rambler essays typically point to how long a traditional notion has been held before skeptically picking it apart, the Idler follows the Spectator by offering entertaining confirmation of bits of common knowledge. Only eight Idler essays (out of 104) take the Rambler ’s approach; the rest begin by stating what is “commonly observed” ( Idler 11, in Yale Works , vol. ii, 36) or what “commonly happens” ( Idler 18, vol. ii, 56), or by presenting a precept (“There is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth”: Idler 20, vol. ii, 62; “Prudence is of more frequent use than any other intellectual quality”: Idler 57, vol. ii, 177) before showing, in a series of examples, how these nuggets of wisdom play out in daily life. This is not the intellectual baptism performed by the Rambler . But the way that many Idler essays dismantle the moral self-righteousness which is always a potential upshot of social satire does recall the Rambler ’s skeptical method.

This aim of the Idler accounts, in part, for the prominence of character sketches in the series (36 percent of Idler essays feature sketches, compared with 21 percent in the Rambler ). Where his first essay series aimed to make readers more independently thoughtful and pious individuals, Johnson’s second strives to promote an ethos of generosity and mild tolerance by reminding readers that they, too, are subject to the foibles they snicker at in others. The example of La Bruyère’s Caractères therefore looms larger in the Idler than it had in the Rambler . But while the best known of the Idler ’s sketches (nos. 60 and 61, devoted to the hapless critic Dick Minim) hew close to traditional character portraits, Johnson sets most of the others in letters from fictional correspondents, which adds another layer of subtlety to his use of them to promote social morality. The letters from Robin Spritely in nos. 78 and 83 exemplify this perfectly. Spritely’s portraits of Sim Scruple, Dick Wormwood, Bob Sturdy, and Phil Gentle in no. 83 slot in neatly with the English tradition of descriptively named characters: Scruple delights in raising doubts; Wormwood compulsively contradicts everyone and everything; Sturdy’s convictions are unshakable; and Gentle acquiesces in every situation. A tenor of amused indulgence prevails as Spritely anatomizes the folly of each, showing at the end how Gentle’s refusal to take a position in an inconclusive debate allows all the others privately to feel as if they’ve actually won. Beyond what is implied in these humorous portraits of personal quirks, however, there’s no culminating lesson about proper conduct. These characters simply are who they are: harmless eccentrics whose leading traits an alert reader might mark in any crowd. The fictional letter form moreover allows Johnson to avoid the rigid moralizing of the traditional essayist. Readers must decide how much authority to grant Spritely, who confesses his own failings when he notes that it has taken him a month to follow up his first letter because he (like Johnson) is an inveterate procrastinator despite “how often” he has “praised the dignity of resolution” (Yale Works , vol. ii, 259). This sort of broad acceptance of everyday shortcomings, rooted in clear-eyed self-criticism, is the Idler ’s characteristic mode.

The Idler ’s aim to restore the tolerant good humor of the Tatler and Spectator to the genre thus parallels the Rambler ’s reassertion of the classic periodical essay’s formal integrity with its half-sheets. And the distinct tenor of each series finally harmonizes in the Idler ’s last number. The coincidental publication of this final essay on Holy Saturday makes Johnson nudge his readers to begin “the review of life” and “the renovation of holy purposes,” for “the termination of any period of life reminds us that life itself has likewise its termination” (Yale Works , vol. ii, 259). It’s a somewhat jarring conclusion to “this series of trifles,” though only those determined to hear nothing but sententiousness in Johnson’s voice could miss the winking in the essay’s last words, which encourage readers to think of “the day in which every work of the hand, and imagination of the heart shall be brought to judgment, and an everlasting futurity shall be determined by the past” (vol. ii, 259). His abiding concern with literary posterity—heard more explicitly in the Rambler ’s concluding ruminations on his “future life” and “the final sentence of mankind”—was never far from Johnson’s mind, even when producing these comparative “trifles” (vol. v, 318; vol. ii, 259).

Looking back from 1802, Alexander Chalmers summed up the Rambler ’s critical fortunes: once “the prejudices which were alarmed by a new style and manner” in the periodical essay had subsided, readers widely acknowledged the “general merit of this work” despite some quibbles from “critics and grammarians” concerning its “labored, and perhaps pedantic sentences.” While a “new set of objectors have appeared since the author’s death,” Chalmers charges them with petty “hostility” to a work designed not “for the uneducated part of the world, nor for those who, whatever their education, read only for their amusement.” 15 Chalmers’s defense of the Rambler ’s lofty aims and dismissal of complaints about its difficult language reveals how much the critical tide had turned by the end of the eighteenth century. He does, however, exaggerate how shocked readers were by the series when it first appeared, for the ostensible “alarm” at the Rambler ’s “style and manner” was quite late in sounding: not until 1779, when Vicesimus Knox censured the “affected appearance of pomposity”—“disgusting to all readers”—which makes the Rambler “greatly inferior to the easy and natural Spectator,” did critics begin to assert a strong preference for the more genial style of Addison and Steele (Chalmers, in Critical Heritage , 81). 16 Before then, and still well into the 1780s, critical assessments of the series repeated verbatim David Erskine Baker’s 1764 declaration that the Rambler “proved at least equal, if not superior, to” the Tatler and Spectator . 17 Even those like Joseph Towers, who found the Rambler “less calculated for general reading” than the Spectator , and James Harrison, who regretted that the essays are “encumbered by words which possess too much Latinity for a mere English reader,” concurred that it was “more interesting to literary men” and an “exquisite periodical paper.” 18

Yet by the end of the 1790s a critical consensus had developed that the Rambler ’s laborious language interfered with the modus operandi of the periodical essay—to help readers more deeply appreciate the moral dimensions of everyday life. The Idler ’s reputation, meanwhile, rose a bit as the Rambler ’s declined, while the Adventurer —considered as “a continuation” of the Rambler —was typically dispatched in a single sentence. 19 William Shaw’s preference of the Idler for its “spirit” and “greater variety of subjects” was still unusual in 1785; but when Arthur Murphy less than a decade later characterized the Idler as “the Odyssey after the Iliad ” because its “style of ease and unlaboured elegance” offers a pleasing break from “the fatigue of thinking” the Rambler foists on readers, he demonstrated why the Idler could have wider popular appeal (Murphy, in Critical Heritage , 72). 20 By the time Chalmers rose to the Rambler ’s defense, contending that in the Idler Johnson “sometimes forgot the exclusive business of the moral Essayist, [and] meddled with the occasional politics of the day,” he faced a growing consensus that, as William Mudford put it, “Johnson’s reflections on life in [the Idler ] are more natural than in his Rambler ,” and hence “far more valuable.” 21 Judged by early nineteenth-century standards of nature, it was clear to most that the Idler displays “more candour in [its] delineations, and more veracity in [its] assertions” than its more professedly serious predecessor (Mudford, in Critical Heritage , 80).

By the time William Hazlitt published his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), the revolution in English critical assessments of the Rambler was complete. Johnson’s major achievement as an essayist was, to Hazlitt, everything that a periodical essay series should not be: unnatural, unoriginal, stilted, and leaden. Compared with the “memorandums of the events and incidents of the day, … finished studies after nature, and characters fresh from the life” that abound in the Tatler and Spectator , the Rambler to Hazlitt appears as an “imposing commonplace-book of general topics” containing “hardly a reflection … which had not been already suggested and developed by some other author, or in the common course of conversation.” 22 Johnson “does not set us thinking for the first time,” nor do the essays offer readers anything like “a new truth gained to the mind” ( Collected Works , vol. viii, 100). And where Murphy had offered a portrait of Johnson in the Rambler as “a dictator in his splendid robes” who “darts his lightning, and rolls his thunder, in the cause of virtue and piety” ( Critical Heritage , 71), Hazlitt represents Johnson’s style as “the mimic thunder at one of our theatres,” while “the light he throws upon a subject is like the dazzling effect of phosphorous, or an ignis fatuus of words” ( Collected Works , vol. viii, 101). Curiously, Hazlitt ignores the Idler , which would seem closer in tenor and execution to his ideal of the periodical essay (though he does pause to dismiss the Adventurer as “completely trite and vapid”: Collected Works , vol. viii, 104). Perhaps it was enough to erect the Rambler as the main foil to the Spectator . To an extent, this is how the Rambler is still read. What has changed is our tendency to consider the essays as concentrated expressions of Johnson’s moral and philosophical thought rather than to situate them firmly in the popular milieu of the periodical essay. In this post-Boswell context, the Rambler seems always to have transcended its moment in ways that make Hazlitt appear to have missed the point. But, by overlooking the extent of Johnson’s particular engagement with this once ubiquitous and highly regarded genre, we too can miss much about his achievements as an essayist.

Further Reading

Damrosch, Leopold , Jr. “Johnson’s Manner of Proceeding in the Rambler .” ELH 40, no. 1 (Spring 1973 ): 70–89.

Dixon, John Converse. “ Politicizing Samuel Johnson: The Moral Essays and the Question of Ideology. ” College Literature 25, no. 3 (Fall 1998 ): 67–91.

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Fussell, Paul. “ ‘The Anxious Employment of a Periodical Writer.’ ” In Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing , 143–80. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971 .

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Italia, Iona. “Johnson as Moralist in the Rambler .” The Age of Johnson 14 ( 2003 ): 51–76.

Korshin, Paul J. “Johnson’s Rambler and Its Audiences.” In Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre , edited by Alexander J. Butrym , 92–105. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989 .

O’Flaherty, Patrick. “Johnson’s Idler : The Equipment of a Satirist.” ELH 37, no. 2 (June 1970): 211–25.

O’Flaherty, Patrick. “Towards an Understanding of Johnson’s Rambler .” SEL 1500–1900 18, no. 3 (Summer 1978 ): 523–36.

Powell, Manushag N. “Johnson and His ‘Readers’ in the Epistolary ‘ Rambler ’ Essays.” SEL 1500–1900 44, no. 3 (Summer 2004 ): 571–94.

Reinert, Thomas. “Periodical Moralizing.” In Regulating Confusion: Samuel Johnson and the Crowd , 46–74. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996 .

Rogers, Pat. “The Rambler and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay: A Dissenting View.” In Telling People What to Think: Early Eighteenth-Century Periodicals from “The Review” to “The Rambler , ” edited by J. A. Downie and Thomas N. Corns , 116–29. London: F. Cass, 1993 .

Spector, Robert D.   Samuel Johnson and the Essay . Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997 .

Van Tassel, Mary M. “Johnson’s Elephant: The Reader of the Rambler .” SEL 1500–1900 28, no. 3 (Summer 1988 ): 461–9.

Wildermuth, Mark E. “Johnson’s Prose Style: Blending Energy and Elegance in the Rambler .” The Age of Johnson 6 ( 1993 ): 205–35.

Woodruff, James F. “Johnson’s Idler and the Anatomy of Idleness.” English Studies in Canada 6, no. 1 (Spring 1980 ): 22–38.

Woodruff, James F. “Johnson’s Rambler and Its Contemporary Context.” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 85, no. 1 (Spring 1982 ): 27–64.

  Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith , ed. Arthur Friedman , 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), vol. i, 447 .

  The Free-thinker : 1718, 1722, 1733, 1739, 1740, 1742; The Female Spectator : 1746, 1747, 1748, 1750, 1755, 1766, 1775; The Humourist : 1720, 1724, 1725, 1730, 1735, 1741.

See Richard Ingrams , ed., Dr Johnson by Mrs Thrale: The “Anecdotes” of Mrs Piozzi in the Original Form (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), 22 .

  John Gay , Poetry and Prose , ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. ii, 452 .

For a full exposition of the impact character writing had on the development of the English periodical essay, see Richard Squibbs , Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 42–80 .

  The Humourist (London, 1720), xxxi. See Nathan Drake , Essays, Biographical, Critical, and Historical, Illustrative of the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler , 3 vols. (London, 1809), vol. i, 48 . Drake was unable to verify that The Humourist ever circulated as sheets, and no further information has since come to light.

  The Spectator , ed. Donald F. Bond , 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. i, 45 .

See Rambler 131, in Yale Works , vol. iv, 331–5; Rambler s 172, 181, 182, and 184, in Yale Works , vol. v, 145–50, 187–96, 200–5; and Woodruff, “Johnson’s Rambler ,” 27–8.

See Woodruff, “Johnson’s Rambler ,” 33, 49, 56–7.

Quoted in The British Essayists, vol. xix, The Adventurer , ed. Alexander Chalmers (Boston, MA, 1856), 11 .

  The Adventurer 1 (1753), 6, 420; 2 (1754), 415.

See Philip Mahone Griffith , “ ‘A Truly Elegant Work’: The Contemporary Reputation of Hawkesworth’s Adventurer ,” in Robert B. White, Jr. , ed., The Dress of Words: Essays on Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature in Honor of Richmond P. Bond (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Libraries, 1978), 199–208 .

And four unpublished dissertations from 1963 to 1978.

For the satiric turn of the World and Connoisseur , see Squibbs, Urban Enlightenment , 73–80.

  Alexander Chalmers , in James T. Boulton , ed., Johnson: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 81 , 85.

  Vicesimus Knox , “On the Periodical Essayists,” in Essays, Moral and Literary , 2 vols. (London: 1779), vol. i, 164 .

  David Erskine Baker , “Mr. Samuel Johnson, M.A.,” in O M Brack, Jr. and Robert E. Kelley , eds., The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1974), 6 . For repetitions of this judgment, see Early Biographies , 10, 20, 26, 103.

Joseph Towers, “An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” in Early Biographies , 196; James Harrison, “The Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” in Early Biographies , 271.

Arthur Murphy, “Essay on the Life and Genius of Johnson,” in Critical Heritage , 72. Knox, “Periodical Essayists,” calls the Adventurer “an imitation of the Rambler ” (164).

William Shaw, “Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late Dr. Samuel Johnson,” in Early Biographies , 169.

  Chalmers, in The British Essayists , vol. xxxiii (London, 1817), xi; William Mudford , A Critical Enquiry (1802), in Critical Heritage , 80 .

  William Hazlitt , The Collected Works , ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover , 13 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1902–4), vol. viii, 100 .

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Court — The Johnson’s Case

The Johnson's Case

• Categories: Court

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Published: Oct 11, 2018

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Thesis: Thesis

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What is a Thesis Statement?

A thesis statement is:  .

• The statement of the author’s position on a topic or subject.
• Clear, concise, and goes beyond fact or observation to become an idea that needs to be supported (arguable).
• Often a statement of tension, where the author refutes or complicates an existing assumption or claim (counterargument).
• Often answers WHY or HOW questions related to the topic at hand.

The  thesis statement  is the brief articulation of your paper's central argument and purpose. You might hear it referred to as simply a "thesis." Every scholarly paper should have a thesis statement, and strong thesis statements are concise, specific, and arguable.  Concise  means the thesis is short: perhaps one or two sentences for a shorter paper.  Specific  means the thesis deals with a narrow and focused topic, appropriate to the paper's length.  Arguable  means that a scholar in your field could disagree (or perhaps already has!).

Strong thesis statements address specific intellectual questions, have clear positions, and use a structure that reflects the overall structure of the paper. Read on to learn more about constructing a strong thesis statement.

How do I know if my thesis is strong?

• Do I answer the question? Re-reading the question prompt after constructing a working thesis can help you fix an argument that misses the focus of the question.
•  Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it's possible that you are simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a strong argument. If your thesis contains words like "good" or "successful," see if you could be more specific: why is something "good"; what specifically makes something "successful"?
•  Does my thesis pass the "So what?" test? If a reader's first response is, "So what?" then you need to clarify, to forge a relationship, or to connect to a larger issue.
•  Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering? If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. It's o.k. to change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured out in the course of writing your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as necessary.
•  Does my thesis pass the "how and why?" test? If a reader's first response is "how?" or "why?" your thesis may be too open-ended and lack guidance for the reader.

Creating a Debate

This thesis statement includes only obvious fact or plot summary instead of argument:

Needs Improvement:  Leadership is an important quality in nurse educators.

A good strategy to determine if your thesis statement is too broad (and therefore, not arguable) is to ask yourself, "Would a scholar in my field disagree with this point?" Here, we can see easily that no scholar is likely to argue that leadership is an unimportant quality in nurse educators.  The student needs to come up with a more arguable claim, and probably a narrower one; remember that a short paper needs a more focused topic than a dissertation.

Better:  Roderick's (2009) theory of participatory leadership  is particularly appropriate to nurse educators working within the emergency medicine field, where students benefit most from collegial and kinesthetic learning.

Here, the student has identified a particular type of leadership ("participatory leadership"), narrowing the topic, and has made an arguable claim (this type of leadership is "appropriate" to a specific type of nurse educator). Conceivably, a scholar in the nursing field might disagree with this approach. The student's paper can now proceed, providing specific pieces of evidence to support the arguable central claim.

Elements To a Good Thesis Statement

• Take on a subject upon which reasonable people could disagree.
• Deal with a subject that can be adequately treated given the nature of the assignment.
• Express one main idea.
• Assert your conclusions about a subject.

Being Specific

This thesis statement has no specific argument:

Needs Improvement:  In this essay, I will examine two scholarly articles to find similarities and differences.

This statement is concise, but it is neither specific nor arguable—a reader might wonder, "Which scholarly articles? What is the topic of this paper? What field is the author writing in?" Additionally, the purpose of the paper—to "examine…to find similarities and differences" is not of a scholarly level. Identifying similarities and differences is a good first step, but strong academic argument goes further, analyzing what those similarities and differences might mean or imply.

Better:  In this essay, I will argue that Bowler's (2003) autocratic management style, when coupled with Smith's (2007) theory of social cognition, can reduce the expenses associated with employee turnover.

The new revision here is still concise, as well as specific and arguable.  We can see that it is specific because the writer is mentioning (a) concrete ideas and (b) exact authors.  We can also gather the field (business) and the topic (management and employee turnover). The statement is arguable because the student goes beyond merely comparing; he or she draws conclusions from that comparison ("can reduce the expenses associated with employee turnover").

Leaving Room for Discussion

This thesis statement is not capable of development or advancement in the paper:

Needs Improvement:  There are always alternatives to illegal drug use.

This sample thesis statement makes a claim, but it is not a claim that will sustain extended discussion. This claim is the type of claim that might be appropriate for the conclusion of a paper, but in the beginning of the paper, the student is left with nowhere to go. What further points can be made? If there are "always alternatives" to the problem the student is identifying, then why bother developing a paper around that claim? Ideally, a thesis statement should be complex enough to explore over the length of the entire paper.

Better:  The most effective treatment plan for methamphetamine addiction may be a combination of pharmacological and cognitive therapy, as argued by Baker (2008), Smith (2009), and Xavier (2011).

In the revised thesis, you can see the student make a specific, debatable claim that has the potential to generate several pages' worth of discussion. When drafting a thesis statement, think about the questions your thesis statement will generate: What follow-up inquiries might a reader have? In the first example, there are almost no additional questions implied, but the revised example allows for a good deal more exploration.

Weak Thesis vs Stong Thesis

A strong thesis takes some sort of stand.

Weak : There are some negative and positive aspects to manifest destiny.

Strong: Because manifest destiny promoted development and resulted in the development of the West, it was a positive part of American history.

Weak : There are some economic and some political causes of the French Revolution.

Strong : Although the lack of competent national leadership led to the French Revolution, the most significant causes were economic.

Weak: The Gilded Age was in the nineteenth century.

Strong: While the Gilded Age is viewed by many as a period of oppression of the working class and corruption in politics and business, development of economic potential and new technology helped build a strong nation in the late nineteenth century.

Weak: The Roman Empire did not last forever. Strong: Due to military decay, the fall of Rome was inevitable.

Thesis Mad Libs

If you are having trouble getting started, try using the models below to generate a rough model of a thesis statement! These models are intended for drafting purposes only and should not appear in your final work.

• In this essay, I argue ____, using ______ to assert _____.
• While scholars have often argued ______, I argue______, because_______.
• Through an analysis of ______, I argue ______, which is important because_______.

Words to Avoid and to Embrace

When drafting your thesis statement, avoid words like  explore, investigate, learn, compile, summarize , and  explain  to describe the main purpose of your paper. These words imply a paper that summarizes or "reports," rather than synthesizing and analyzing.

Instead of the terms above, try words like  argue, critique, question , and  interrogate . These more analytical words may help you begin strongly, by articulating a specific, critical, scholarly position.

Read Kayla's  blog post  for tips on taking a stand in a well-crafted thesis statement.

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What Is a Capstone Project vs. Thesis

As students near the end of their academic journey, they encounter a crucial project called the capstone – a culmination of all they've learned. But what exactly is a capstone project? 

This article aims to demystify capstone projects, explaining what they are, why they matter, and what you can expect when you embark on this final academic endeavor.

Capstone Project Meaning

A capstone project is a comprehensive, culminating academic endeavor undertaken by students typically in their final year of study. 

It synthesizes their learning experiences, requiring students to apply the knowledge, skills, and competencies gained throughout their academic journey. A capstone project aims to address a real-world problem or explore a topic of interest in depth. 

As interdisciplinary papers, capstone projects encourage critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity. They allow students to showcase their mastery of their field of study and demonstrate their readiness for future academic or professional pursuits.

Now that we’ve defined what is a capstone project, let’s discuss its importance in the academic landscape. In case you have short-form compositions to handle, simply say, ‘ do my essay for me ,’ and our writers will take care of your workload.

Why Is a Capstone Project Important

A capstone project is crucial because it allows students to combine everything they've learned in school and apply it to real-life situations or big problems. 

It's like the ultimate test of what they know and can do. By working on these projects, students get hands-on experience, learn to think critically and figure out how to solve tough problems. 

Plus, it's a chance to show off their skills and prove they're ready for whatever comes next, whether that's starting a career or going on to more schooling.

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What Is the Purpose of a Capstone Project

Here are three key purposes of a capstone project:

Integration of Knowledge and Skills

Capstones often require students to draw upon the knowledge and skills they have acquired throughout their academic program. The importance of capstone project lies in helping students synthesize what they have learned and apply it to a real-world problem or project. 

This integration helps students demonstrate their proficiency and readiness for graduation or entry into their chosen profession.

Culmination of Learning

Capstone projects culminate a student's academic journey, allowing them to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world scenarios. 

tackling a significant project or problem, students demonstrate their understanding of concepts and their ability to translate them into practical solutions, reinforcing their learning journey.

Professional Development

Capstone projects allow students to develop skills relevant to their future careers. These projects can also be tangible examples of their capabilities to potential employers or graduate programs.

Whether it's conducting research, presenting findings, or collaborating with peers, students gain valuable experience that enhances their professional readiness. 

Types of Capstone Projects

Capstones vary widely depending on the academic discipline, institution, and specific program requirements. Here are some common types:

What Is the Difference Between a Thesis and a Capstone Project

Here's a breakdown of the key differences between a thesis and a capstone project:

How to Write a Capstone Project

Let's dive into the specifics with actionable and meaningful steps for writing a capstone project:

1. Select a Pertinent Topic

Identify a topic that aligns with your academic interests, program requirements, and real-world relevance. Consider issues or challenges within your field that merit further exploration or solution. 

Conduct thorough research to ensure the topic is both feasible and significant. Here are some brilliant capstone ideas for your inspiration.

2. Define Clear Objectives

Clearly articulate the objectives of your capstone project. What specific outcomes do you aim to achieve? 

Whether it's solving a problem, answering a research question, or developing a product, ensure your objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

3. Conduct Comprehensive Research

Dive deep into existing literature, theories, and empirical evidence related to your chosen topic. Identify gaps, controversies, or areas for further investigation. 

Synthesize relevant findings and insights to inform the development of your project and provide a solid foundation for your analysis or implementation.

4. Develop a Structured Plan

What is a capstone project in college without a rigid structure? Outline a comprehensive plan for your capstone project, including key milestones, tasks, and deadlines. 

Break down the project into manageable phases, such as literature review, data collection, analysis, and presentation. Establish clear criteria for success and regularly monitor progress to stay on track.

5. Implement Methodological Rigor

If your project involves research, ensure methodological rigor by selecting appropriate research methods, tools, and techniques. 

Develop a detailed research design or project plan that addresses key methodological considerations, such as sampling, data collection, analysis, and validity. Adhere to ethical guidelines and best practices throughout the research process.

6. Analyze and Interpret Findings

Analyze your data or findings using appropriate analytical techniques and tools. Interpret the results in relation to your research questions or objectives, highlighting key patterns, trends, or insights. 

Critically evaluate the significance and implications of your findings within the broader context of your field or industry.

7. Communicate Effectively

Present your capstone project clearly, concisely, and compellingly. Whether it's a written report, presentation, or multimedia deliverable, tailor your communication style to your target audience. Clearly articulate your research questions, methodology, findings, and conclusions. 

Use visuals, examples, and real-world applications to enhance understanding and engagement. Be prepared to defend your project and answer questions from peers, faculty, or stakeholders.

In wrapping up, what is a capstone project? It’s like the grand finale of your academic journey, where all the knowledge and skills you've acquired come together in one big project. 

It's not just about passing a test or getting a grade – it's about proving you've got what it takes to make a real difference in the world. So, if you ever need capstone project help , our writers will gladly lend you a hand in no time.

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What Is a Capstone Project in College?

How to do a capstone project, how long does a capstone project take to complete.

Annie Lambert

specializes in creating authoritative content on marketing, business, and finance, with a versatile ability to handle any essay type and dissertations. With a Master’s degree in Business Administration and a passion for social issues, her writing not only educates but also inspires action. On EssayPro blog, Annie delivers detailed guides and thought-provoking discussions on pressing economic and social topics. When not writing, she’s a guest speaker at various business seminars.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

• T. (2023, June 16). What Is a Capstone Project? National University. https://www.nu.edu/blog/what-is-a-capstone-project/
• Lukins, S. (2024, May 12). What is a capstone project? And why is it important? Top Universities. https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/careers-advice-articles/what-capstone-project-why-it-important
• Capstone Project vs. Thesis: What’s the Difference? (2021, December 9). UAGC. https://www.uagc.edu/blog/capstone-project-vs-thesis-whats-difference

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Opinion | My City, My Voice: What do Baltimore teens wish…

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Opinion | My City, My Voice: What do Baltimore teens wish others knew about them?

I just wanted to be a kid for once. That rare night out flipped how I feel about becoming an adult.

Free. That’s what my friends and I felt one surprisingly warm October night as we drove around Towson. I had grown up inside of my home, not allowed to go anywhere with anyone, as the streets were too dangerous. My entire life was “Did you hear about … what happened at …?”

There is no place for teenagers in Baltimore. It’s just a cycle of keeping an eye out for possible danger that is everywhere. If you walk for long enough, you’ll hear gunshots off in the distance, a grown man trying to holla at a girl, young or old, police and ambulance sirens closing in. Everyone says New York is “the city that never sleeps” but living in Baltimore, I beg to differ.

Asking my mother a question like “Can I go out with friends?”, something she has said “no” to so many times before was the most nerve-wracking thing to me. This time, I hoped she’d say yes. She had to. I was an “A” and “B” student. I was about to turn 18. I was a good kid who just wanted to be a kid at least once before it was over.

The thought of turning 18 was, to me, not a fun one like people made it out to be. Turning 18 in Baltimore was an inevitable fear. Eighteen meant needing to have a job even if you hated it. Eighteen meant soon being questioned by family and friends whether you had a man and when were you going to have kids. At 18, Baltimore started looking like an invisible box, walking up and down the same street you grew up on, to go to work and to come home, and nothing else, that is, until God called you home. I didn’t want any of that, but it felt inevitable.

Shockingly, my mother said yes. That night, we went bowling, walked around the mall, ate, and laughed. We piled into a friend’s mother’s minivan and drove around until it was time to go home, having already planned the next time we would go out.

That night lit something inside me. Something clicked, something hot, something that made my heart swell beyond my chest, something that made my mind wander beyond the few streets of Baltimore City that I knew. That night being 18 in Baltimore wasn’t the end, but my beginning.

— Chanée Howard, 18, Franklin Square*

Expecting the worst out of teens is a stereotype that fulfills and perpetuates itself.

When I was younger I felt as though I could be anything and that nothing could stop me from being what I wanted to be. But now, I feel something different. Teens in Baltimore are capable of extraordinary things, but people don’t seem to care enough to see it.

My parents are some of those adults who want to believe in me to graduate and go to college. But they don’t see what I see, feel what I feel, or even think what I think. Can you believe that my dad thought I couldn’t get into Western High School? He told me not in a sour way but in a surprised voice. I didn’t know how to feel. But I felt like most teenagers in Baltimore — “dumb” — even if they won’t admit it, ’cause, if someone close didn’t believe in me, how could I?

You see, when I look on social media on those Baltimore pages, I don’t see anything about teenagers doing anything great. Instead, I see teenagers who either committed a crime or have died. The adolescents who live in Baltimore will always be thought about in this way simply because we follow the adolescents before us.

People don’t say, “Oh yeah, didn’t a teenager get an award there last month?” Instead, they say, “Didn’t a boy die ’cause he was dealing with gangs?” But that boy could’ve been remembered by something else.

This is who they are supposed to be. When we are brought up, people don’t say, “Oh yeah, didn’t a teenager get an award there last month?” Instead, they say, “Didn’t a boy die ’cause he was dealing with gangs?” But that boy could’ve been remembered by something else. He could’ve been a well-known artist remembered by his art and not violence. The thing is that teenagers here will always end up in a bad situation because we are following adults here and we will soon tell our teens the same statements.

We only know what we see and hear. We don’t know what we can show and tell because there is no one there to truly believe in us. Being a teen in Baltimore shouldn’t be in the way of me and others being someone great. Teenagers in Baltimore are capable of extraordinary things but they don’t know how to share their abilities, nor does it seem people care enough to see them. So I just sit, put my headphones on and see what most adults can’t.

— Jaylah James, 15, Edmondson Village*

In a city of contrasts, drugs and guns are opportunities that can knock persistently.

As a teenager living in Baltimore, I wish people understood how easy it was to make bad decisions. I am an immigrant, hailing from Nigeria. I immigrated well over seven years ago, coming to live in eastern Baltimore. My time living as a teenager in Baltimore has come with many perks, and penalties as well. Baltimore is extremely culturally diverse, with its residents saluting from many different places in the world. Because of this, I have been open to loads of different points of view, and the dissimilar ways that people see life. Nevertheless, there is one thing that many Baltimoreans can agree on: the danger that comes with living in our city. There are countless examples of why Baltimore is so dangerous, which is constantly covered by the media. However, no one has ever truly expanded on how much more threatening it is as a teen living in Baltimore City.

Everywhere I go, I am met with persistent examples of why Baltimore is so rich: the art, the food, the music, etc. Nonetheless, I am also faced with reasons why it is so easy to be led astray in this city. To say that the opportunities in Baltimore are endless would not be an understatement, but that does not always have good meaning behind it. As a teenager in this city, it is almost impossible to avoid an experience with some form of illegality, especially when it comes to substances. I am almost ashamed to speak about how easy it would be for me to obtain some form of drugs, guns, and even more as a teenager. To say that it is practically normal for people my age to have experience with this would be an understatement. I am enraged at how easy it is to be led astray as a young person. I am frustrated that there are not enough set laws and regulations in place that prevent this. However, in spite of all of this, I am disheartened that experience in these topics is viewed as customary, just because I happen to be a teenager who lives in Baltimore.

— Victoria Atewogbola, 14, Belair-Edison*

To try to fit in, I was changing who I was. I caught myself, but too many teens don’t.

To put it simply, the city of Baltimore is a tough hill to climb; it’s a hill that so many fail to climb, especially teenagers. It’s a hill that needs to be climbed in order to navigate your way through this city.

Being a teenager in Baltimore can feel like walking through a room with no lights. Many teenagers feel lost. Many teenagers feel a constant need to fit in that can lead them to make poor decisions out of fear of being picked on for not fitting in.

When I migrated from Trinidad to Baltimore I was met with a drastic culture change. The schools of Baltimore, the citizens of Baltimore, the places of Baltimore, etc. It was all so new to me, I felt out of place as if I wasn’t meant to be here. Wherever I spoke others looked at me as though my words were secret codes only I knew. The kids thought of me as some alien that was attending their school from some alien planet they never heard of. All of this led to me making decisions I should have left as just thoughts, such as changing who I was in order to be accepted. I did all of this as a shield to protect me from the poisonous arrows that came after every laugh, every negative comment, every bit of embarrassment.

So many teenagers have taken the wrong road as I almost did. Some don’t even realize they are going the wrong way until they no longer recognize their surroundings or even themselves as they are too far gone.

Looking back I realize that many teenagers have been through this; they are going through it right now as I write down these words. Teenagers in Baltimore are lost in the dark room searching for the light. It’s time that more people help those teenagers find the light by understanding their struggles. So many teenagers have taken the wrong road, as I almost did. Some don’t even realize they are going the wrong way until they no longer recognize their surroundings or even themselves as they are too far gone. But there is always hope. Impossible only exists if you don’t believe in possible. You don’t water the leaves of a plant, you water the roots. It’s time we look for the root of the problem before we start attacking what’s on the outside. Teenagers of Baltimore are heavily influenced by others; it’s time to limit this influence and open the gate to let the true love of Baltimore flow once again. It’s never too late.

— Brandi Gonzales, 14, Cheswolde*

People know Baltimore’s quirks and problems. But they don’t know me.

Being a teenager in Baltimore can be intimidating. Most people have an idea of what you should be like, talk like, and act like, but I don’t fit in any of those boxes. The majority of people get their information from social media and occasionally the news, though it isn’t as popular in this generation. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X, formerly Twitter, have made it a common thing to categorize people from Baltimore claiming they know us from the way we say “tew” or based on how we dance. But I wish people understood that not all of us are the same or fit in that box.

I personally don’t want to be defined by my environment. Just because I live in Park Heights doesn’t mean I sell drugs. Just because I work in Mondawmin Mall doesn’t mean I witness shootings all the time. These are just a few of the fixed assumptions people make about people from Baltimore City. I couldn’t be more opposite. I am usually shy and avoid meeting new people. If I see a crowd of people, I’m quick to go another way even if it means it takes me longer to get to my destination. I work at Mondawmin Mall because it’s close and convenient. I’ve never had alcohol or drugs and don’t plan on doing so. I haven’t gotten into a fight since middle school, and I hate dancing in public. I wish people understood that a lot of teens have goals and want to leave this city but often don’t have the opportunities or financial stability to do so.

Sometimes even our family holds us back, whether that is because they need us to take care of our younger siblings or for more selfish reasons. Too many of us are young moms and feel that that’s our sole responsibility and we can’t leave or dedicate time to school because we’re too busy being moms. I know this could apply to people all over the world, but I think people don’t really expect successful people from Baltimore or have lost hope, especially for teens. Living in Baltimore, a city of lost souls, poverty and crime doesn’t define me. I will always put my best foot forward and continue to strive for the best,  regardless of what people think even if that means I’ll have to do it on my own.

— Amirah Haney, 18, Arlington*

Gunshots can have a long echo for the young bereaved like me.

Do you know how hard it is for teenagers to grow up with one parent? Growing up with one parent is hard and it’s very sad and stressful. Being a teenager in Baltimore, there’s a lot of killing that takes people’s families away from them, seeing a loved one just be gone forever. People should understand that it’s hard and it could change the person mentally and emotionally by losing a loved one.

During my childhood, I always spent time with my dad, always having fun around the people he was around and feeling loved. At the age of 6, my dad was taken away from me by gun violence and I was never going to be able to see him again. The rest of my childhood was good because I didn’t realize the loss I had until I got older. My dad’s death wasn’t impacting me because I was so young. I just knew that I wasn’t seeing him anymore; even at his funeral, I wasn’t sad.

As I got older I started to get sadder. I tried to stay connected with my dad’s side of the family that I would always be around but eventually, we fell off. Finally hearing the story of how my dad passed was creating anger in me. I started to put my guard up with everyone; I didn’t trust anyone. My mom started to see the change in me. I wasn’t letting anyone in and didn’t talk about my feelings at all. I became very calm and emotionless about everything.

I had no other parent to go to when I and my mom got into an argument like other kids did. Seeing my cousins have a good relationship with their dads would sometimes hurt me because I wish I could have that.

The way I changed started to affect all of my relationships. I was going through changes mentally and more and more people started to realize something was wrong. Every time I had to talk about my feelings, I shut down. Having only one parent was hard at times. I had no other parent to go to when I and my mom got into an argument like other kids did. Seeing my cousins have a good relationship with their dads would sometimes hurt me because I wish I could have that.

As a teenager in Baltimore, I want people to understand that gun violence kills family members and it impacts us by causing us to change mentally and emotionally.

— Laithan Phillips, 15, Perring Loch

Baltimore is brimming with passion. I see it, but more people need to be shown it.

s expected, Baltimore is defined as an “urban” area. According to the Department of Health, urban areas are “”locations with high population density.” However, as a society, we have labeled the word urban as another word for Black. Some may also argue that “urban” has a negative connotation. Despite knowing that, I am proud to say I am from an urban area. I am proud to say I am from Baltimore.

When people think of Baltimore, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Poverty? Drugs? Even murder? As someone who has lived in Baltimore for as long as I can remember, I can tell you Baltimore is so much more than that.

Baltimore bleeds passion from every crack and crevice. Growing up in Baltimore, you realize that there is passion all around you. Everyone wants to have a grind; everyone wants to have a hustle. From little girls braiding hair, to boys cutting hair. People from this city want others to succeed. They want another success story about how someone from their city made it. They want inspiration and proof that they can reach their goals while being from a city that is portrayed so negatively.

People from this city want others to succeed. They want another success story about how someone from their city made it. They want inspiration and proof that they can reach their goals while being from a city that is portrayed so negatively.

I’d say Baltimore is the hidden gem of cities. When you think of places you want to visit or potentially live, Baltimore is usually not on the list. It is overlooked, despite being one of the most beautiful, passionate and hearty cities out there.

No other place goes as hard for their city as Baltimore. We rock Ravens jerseys as if the last time we made it to the Super Bowl wasn’t 2013. The whole city makes a ruckus over the Poly vs. City homecoming game, despite us knowing who wins before the game even begins. You know you’re in Baltimore when you see people rocking Under Armour like it’s designer. You know you’re in Baltimore when you see a group of girls and they’re all wearing puff-sleeved denim jackets. We are the type of city that despite any “beef” we may have with people, we know when Lor Scoota comes on it’s time to put that all aside. We’re the type of city that has everyone mesmerized when pronouncing “to” and “you.” Baltimore is the type of city to have a mayor with an Afro. Baltimore is much more than what they show in the media.

— Empress Rasheem, 16, Hamilton Hills

How does it feel to be a teen? Under-understood.

Being a teen in Baltimore ain’t an easy life. When you are living in a fast world, it’s hard to balance growing up fast to adapt to society but not too fast to be seen as fast.

Around my peers, I always feel like I’m behind in something as if I’m too short on something. I’m always the “No, I don’t smoke” friend, the “I don’t go to parties” friend. But strangely enough, I’m the most experienced. I’m the friend that “swears like a sailor” or can give you relationship advice. Nevertheless, I’m also a friend that you can lean on because I understand what it’s like to feel alone. I listen to my friends dealing with mental health because I understand what it’s like to feel like something is always wrong with you, that I’m never enough. I always feel like teenage life is hating yourself until you have reached self-acceptance. I understand that my peers smoke because their life ain’t easy, that they use smoking to help the fact that their life ain’t no piece of cake. I understand that my peers go to parties to let go of their problems and have fun. I just wish adults understood that. I’m not condoning smoking or the bad things that come with partying;  however, I understand.

Giving kids an environment to be vulnerable helps them shake off their troubles without resorting to drugs.

Understanding is something I think adults lack. It’s always “You think my life’s easy?” or “You’re too young to experience anxiety/depression.” Comments like these cause kids to pick up those habits, especially if their parents do it. Giving kids an environment to be vulnerable helps them shake off their troubles without resorting to drugs. Also, “old school” parents make it harder to balance teen life. I try to use clothes and music to help balance. Yet it always turns into “You’re a representation of me, and you will dress accordingly.” Making me dress as if I’m not a teen. When I listen to music, they worry too much about the fact that the artist is cussing instead of the message.

Saying teen life isn’t easy is an understatement. As teens, we go through a lot that adults can’t understand. Each generation has their problems that they have to deal with growing up. We as teens just want adults to remember their experiences and empathize with teens to help them become independent adults, not just surviving adults.

— Onyx Abung, 15, East Arlington

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If any body is a beach body, any book is a beach read. Try on these books this summer.

Just like any body can be a beach body, any book can be a beach read. 

When you’re packing a travel bag this summer and mulling over the Beach Reads ! display at your local independent bookstore , stop and ask yourself: What do I really want to read? What do I enjoy reading?

The category “beach read,” as best as anyone can tell, came into fashion in the 1990s, according to The Guardian. It’s a marketing trick, not a mandate. 

As a marketing term, it’s successful because it’s aspirational. We see ourselves on a beach, relaxed and lazily reading that fun book with the bright cover, one that looks nothing like spreadsheets or reports, a book that entertains but doesn’t ask too much. 

But not everyone relaxes the same way.

Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist

Maybe you really do want to spend time with the light contemporary fiction, steamy romance, or compulsive thriller that generally gets labeled “beach read.” Totally fine. We’ve got some suggestions for you.

On the other hand, lazy days and long flights mean vacation can be a perfect time to tackle the books you’ve always meant to read. Classics, essays, literary fiction — if you’re a reader who considers heavy reading light work, we’ve got some less conventional recommendations, too. 

Is it a body on the beach? Yes: Beach body. Is it a book on a beach? Yes: Beach read. 

Find your next read USA TODAY's Best-selling booklist

Smart romance

"The Other Side of Disappearing," Kate Clayborn (Kensington, pp 432.. Out now)

What does “smart romance” mean? This book gave me a definition: a romance in which a happy-ever-after ending happens but doesn’t feel required because the characters all had emotional growth. Here, Clayborn sends a true crime podcast producer and a tough-as-nails older sister on a road trip that will change their lives. 

More like this: "Summer Romance," Annabel Monaghan; "When I Think of You," Myah Ariel; "Funny Story," Emily Henry

Literary Larks

"Martyr!," Kaveh Akbar (Penguin Random House, pp.352, out now)

Akbar is a poet, and you can see that in the lyrical writing of his debut novel. The story dips in and out of time and memory and points of view, always twisting around the idea of love. Fun and touching and a little weird, this book is made for hot summer nights. 

More like this: "Help Wanted," Adelle Waldman ; "Come and Get It," Kiley Reid; "Family Meal," Bryan Washington

Literary Adventures

"James," Percival Everett (Doubleday, pp 320, out now)

Consider this retelling of "Huck Finn" your summer reading assignment. Told from the perspective of clever and compassionate Jim, the dangerous Mississippi River raft trip includes familiar stops and characters (no need to read the original), but is sharper and comes with higher stakes as our hero tries to reunite his family. 

More like this: "The Vaster Wilds ," Lauren Groff; "Lies & Weddings", Kevin Kwan; "Lone Women," Victor Lavalle

"While We Were Burning," Sara Koffi (Penguin, pp. 304, out now)

Unreliable narrators and blurry relationship boundaries make this story, examining race and class in Memphis, especially twisty. 

More like this : "First Lie Wins," Ashley Elston; "A Line in The Sand," Kevin Powers; "Bright Young Women," Jessica Knoll 

"The Count of Monte Cristo," Alexander Dumas (Penguin, pp. 1,276, out now)

Don’t be intimidated by size. Many classics, including this one, were written in installments, which means short chapters and built-in cliffhangers. And no matter the time period, people are the same, loving and scheming and struggling. Think of this classic revenge story like your latest binge watch. 

More like this : "Their Eyes Were Watching God," Zora Neale Hurston; "Anna Karenina," Leo Tolstoy; "Jane Eyre," Charlotte Bronte 

"Bite by Bite ," Aimee Nezhukumatathil (HarperCollins, pp. 224, out now)

Essay collections are excellent vacation reads, able to be picked up and put down without interrupting a narrative. Each of these short essays is a perfect little bite, exploring the ways food sparks memory and meaning in our lives. 

More like this: "Divine Might," Natalie Haynes; "The Comfort of Crows," Margaret Renkl; "A Praise Song for Kitchen Ghosts," Crystal Wilkinson

"There’s Always This Year," Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House, pp. 352 out now)

If you want nonfiction that requires you to go a little deeper, Abdurraqib delivers. This is a book about basketball. It’s also about belonging and grief, ambition and America. And all of it is delivered in a structure that perfectly, brilliantly mimics a basketball game. Everything comes down to the final two minutes. 

More like this: "A Map of Future Ruins," Lauren Markham; "Grief Is for People," Sloane Crosley; "This Is What It Sounds Like," Susan Rogers & Ogi Ogas

Hillary Copsey is the book advisor at The Mercantile Library in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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When Prison and Mental Illness Amount to a Death Sentence

The downward spiral of one inmate, Markus Johnson, shows the larger failures of the nation’s prisons to care for the mentally ill.

Supported by

By Glenn Thrush

Photographs by Carlos Javier Ortiz

Glenn Thrush spent more than a year reporting this article, interviewing close to 50 people and reviewing court-obtained body-camera footage and more than 1,500 pages of documents.

• Published May 5, 2024 Updated May 7, 2024

Markus Johnson slumped naked against the wall of his cell, skin flecked with pepper spray, his face a mask of puzzlement, exhaustion and resignation. Four men in black tactical gear pinned him, his face to the concrete, to cuff his hands behind his back.

He did not resist. He couldn’t. He was so gravely dehydrated he would be dead by their next shift change.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

“I didn’t do anything,” Mr. Johnson moaned as they pressed a shield between his shoulders.

It was 1:19 p.m. on Sept. 6, 2019, in the Danville Correctional Center, a medium-security prison a few hours south of Chicago. Mr. Johnson, 21 and serving a short sentence for gun possession, was in the throes of a mental collapse that had gone largely untreated, but hardly unwatched.

He had entered in good health, with hopes of using the time to gain work skills. But for the previous three weeks, Mr. Johnson, who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, had refused to eat or take his medication. Most dangerous of all, he had stealthily stopped drinking water, hastening the physical collapse that often accompanies full-scale mental crises.

Mr. Johnson’s horrific downward spiral, which has not been previously reported, represents the larger failures of the nation’s prisons to care for the mentally ill. Many seriously ill people receive no treatment . For those who do, the outcome is often determined by the vigilance and commitment of individual supervisors and frontline staff, which vary greatly from system to system, prison to prison, and even shift to shift.

The country’s jails and prisons have become its largest provider of inpatient mental health treatment, with 10 times as many seriously mentally ill people now held behind bars as in hospitals. Estimating the population of incarcerated people with major psychological problems is difficult, but the number is likely 200,000 to 300,000, experts say.

Many of these institutions remain ill-equipped to handle such a task, and the burden often falls on prison staff and health care personnel who struggle with the dual roles of jailer and caregiver in a high-stress, dangerous, often dehumanizing environment.

In 2021, Joshua McLemore , a 29-year-old with schizophrenia held for weeks in an isolation cell in Jackson County, Ind., died of organ failure resulting from a “refusal to eat or drink,” according to an autopsy. In April, New York City agreed to pay $28 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the family of Nicholas Feliciano, a young man with a history of mental illness who suffered severe brain damage after attempting to hang himself on Rikers Island — as correctional officers stood by.

Mr. Johnson’s mother has filed a wrongful-death suit against the state and Wexford Health Sources, a for-profit health care contractor in Illinois prisons. The New York Times reviewed more than 1,500 pages of reports, along with depositions taken from those involved. Together, they reveal a cascade of missteps, missed opportunities, potential breaches of protocol and, at times, lapses in common sense.

Prison officials and Wexford staff took few steps to intervene even after it became clear that Mr. Johnson, who had been hospitalized repeatedly for similar episodes and recovered, had refused to take medication. Most notably, they did not transfer him to a state prison facility that provides more intensive mental health treatment than is available at regular prisons, records show.

The quality of medical care was also questionable, said Mr. Johnson’s lawyers, Sarah Grady and Howard Kaplan, a married legal team in Chicago. Mr. Johnson lost 50 to 60 pounds during three weeks in solitary confinement, but officials did not initiate interventions like intravenous feedings or transfer him to a non-prison hospital.

And they did not take the most basic step — dialing 911 — until it was too late.

There have been many attempts to improve the quality of mental health treatment in jails and prisons by putting care on par with punishment — including a major effort in Chicago . But improvements have proved difficult to enact and harder to sustain, hampered by funding and staffing shortages.

Lawyers representing the state corrections department, Wexford and staff members who worked at Danville declined to comment on Mr. Johnson’s death, citing the unresolved litigation. In their interviews with state police investigators, and in depositions, employees defended their professionalism and adherence to procedure, while citing problems with high staff turnover, difficult work conditions, limited resources and shortcomings of co-workers.

But some expressed a sense of resignation about the fate of Mr. Johnson and others like him.

Prisoners have “much better chances in a hospital, but that’s not their situation,” said a senior member of Wexford’s health care team in a deposition.

“I didn’t put them in prison,” he added. “They are in there for a reason.”

Markus Mison Johnson was born on March 1, 1998, to a mother who believed she was not capable of caring for him.

Days after his birth, he was taken in by Lisa Barker Johnson, a foster mother in her 30s who lived in Zion, Ill., a working-class city halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee. Markus eventually became one of four children she adopted from different families.

The Johnson house is a lively split level, with nieces, nephews, grandchildren and neighbors’ children, family keepsakes, video screens and juice boxes. Ms. Johnson sits at its center on a kitchen chair, chin resting on her hand as children wander over to share their thoughts, or to tug on her T-shirt to ask her to be their bathroom buddy.

From the start, her bond with Markus was particularly powerful, in part because the two looked so much alike, with distinctive dimpled smiles. Many neighbors assumed he was her biological son. The middle name she chose for him was intended to convey that message.

“Mison is short for ‘my son,’” she said standing over his modest footstone grave last summer.

He was happy at home. School was different. His grades were good, but he was intensely shy and was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in elementary school.

That was around the time the bullying began. His sisters were fierce defenders, but they could only do so much. He did the best he could, developing a quick, taunting tongue.

These experiences filled him with a powerful yearning to fit in.

It was not to be.

When he was around 15, he called 911 in a panic, telling the dispatcher he saw two men standing near the small park next to his house threatening to abduct children playing there. The officers who responded found nothing out of the ordinary, and rang the Johnsons’ doorbell.

He later told his mother he had heard a voice telling him to “protect the kids.”

He was hospitalized for the first time at 16, and given medications that stabilized him for stretches of time. But the crises would strike every six months or so, often triggered by his decision to stop taking his medication.

His family became adept at reading signs he was “getting sick.” He would put on his tan Timberlands and a heavy winter coat, no matter the season, and perch on the edge of his bed as if bracing for battle. Sometimes, he would cook his own food, paranoid that someone might poison him.

He graduated six months early, on the dean’s list, but was rudderless, and hanging out with younger boys, often paying their way.

His mother pointed out the perils of buying friendship.

“I don’t care,” he said. “At least I’ll be popular for a minute.”

Zion’s inviting green grid of Bible-named streets belies the reality that it is a rough, unforgiving place to grow up. Family members say Markus wanted desperately to prove he was tough, and emulated his younger, reckless group of friends.

Like many of them, he obtained a pistol. He used it to hold up a convenience store clerk for $425 in January 2017, according to police records. He cut a plea deal for two years of probation, and never explained to his family what had made him do it.

But he kept getting into violent confrontations. In late July 2018, he was arrested in a neighbor’s garage with a handgun he later admitted was his. He was still on probation for the robbery, and his public defender negotiated a plea deal that would send him to state prison until January 2020.

An inpatient mental health system

Around 40 percent of the about 1.8 million people in local, state and federal jails and prison suffer from at least one mental illness, and many of these people have concurrent issues with substance abuse, according to recent Justice Department estimates.

Psychological problems, often exacerbated by drug use, often lead to significant medical problems resulting from a lack of hygiene or access to good health care.

“When you suffer depression in the outside world, it’s hard to concentrate, you have reduced energy, your sleep is disrupted, you have a very gloomy outlook, so you stop taking care of yourself,” said Robert L. Trestman , a Virginia Tech medical school professor who has worked on state prison mental health reforms.

The paradox is that prison is often the only place where sick people have access to even minimal care.

But the harsh work environment, remote location of many prisons, and low pay have led to severe shortages of corrections staff and the unwillingness of doctors, nurses and counselors to work with the incarcerated mentally ill.

In the early 2000s, prisoners’ rights lawyers filed a class-action lawsuit against Illinois claiming “deliberate indifference” to the plight of about 5,000 mentally ill prisoners locked in segregated units and denied treatment and medication.

In 2014, the parties reached a settlement that included minimum staffing mandates, revamped screening protocols, restrictions on the use of solitary confinement and the allocation of about $100 million to double capacity in the system’s specialized mental health units.

Yet within six months of the deal, Pablo Stewart, an independent monitor chosen to oversee its enforcement, declared the system to be in a state of emergency.

Over the years, some significant improvements have been made. But Dr. Stewart’s final report , drafted in 2022, gave the system failing marks for its medication and staffing policies and reliance on solitary confinement “crisis watch” cells.

Ms. Grady, one of Mr. Johnson’s lawyers, cited an additional problem: a lack of coordination between corrections staff and Wexford’s professionals, beyond dutifully filling out dozens of mandated status reports.

“Markus Johnson was basically documented to death,” she said.

‘I’m just trying to keep my head up’

Mr. Johnson was not exactly looking forward to prison. But he saw it as an opportunity to learn a trade so he could start a family when he got out.

On Dec. 18, 2018, he arrived at a processing center in Joliet, where he sat for an intake interview. He was coherent and cooperative, well-groomed and maintained eye contact. He was taking his medication, not suicidal and had a hearty appetite. He was listed as 5 feet 6 inches tall and 256 pounds.

Mr. Johnson described his mood as “go with the flow.”

A few days later, after arriving in Danville, he offered a less settled assessment during a telehealth visit with a Wexford psychiatrist, Dr. Nitin Thapar. Mr. Johnson admitted to being plagued by feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness and “constant uncontrollable worrying” that affected his sleep.

He told Dr. Thapar he had heard voices in the past — but not now — telling him he was a failure, and warning that people were out to get him.

At the time he was incarcerated, the basic options for mentally ill people in Illinois prisons included placement in the general population or transfer to a special residential treatment program at the Dixon Correctional Center, west of Chicago. Mr. Johnson seemed out of immediate danger, so he was assigned to a standard two-man cell in the prison’s general population, with regular mental health counseling and medication.

Things started off well enough. “I’m just trying to keep my head up,” he wrote to his mother. “Every day I learn to be stronger & stronger.”

But his daily phone calls back home hinted at friction with other inmates. And there was not much for him to do after being turned down for a janitorial training program.

Then, in the spring of 2019, his grandmother died, sending him into a deep hole.

Dr. Thapar prescribed a new drug used to treat major depressive disorders. Its most common side effect is weight gain. Mr. Johnson stopped taking it.

On July 4, he told Dr. Thapar matter-of-factly during a telehealth check-in that he was no longer taking any of his medications. “I’ve been feeling normal, I guess,” he said. “I feel like I don’t need the medication anymore.”

Dr. Thapar said he thought that was a mistake, but accepted the decision and removed Mr. Johnson from his regular mental health caseload — instructing him to “reach out” if he needed help, records show.

The pace of calls back home slackened. Mr. Johnson spent more time in bed, and became more surly. At a group-therapy session, he sat stone silent, after showing up late.

By early August, he was telling guards he had stopped eating.

At some point, no one knows when, he had intermittently stopped drinking fluids.

‘I’m having a breakdown’

Then came the crash.

On Aug. 12, Mr. Johnson got into a fight with his older cellmate.

He was taken to a one-man disciplinary cell. A few hours later, Wexford’s on-site mental health counselor, Melanie Easton, was shocked by his disoriented condition. Mr. Johnson stared blankly, then burst into tears when asked if he had “suffered a loss in the previous six months.”

He was so unresponsive to her questions she could not finish the evaluation.

Ms. Easton ordered that he be moved to a 9-foot by 8-foot crisis cell — solitary confinement with enhanced monitoring. At this moment, a supervisor could have ticked the box for “residential treatment” on a form to transfer him to Dixon. That did not happen, according to records and depositions.

Around this time, he asked to be placed back on his medication but nothing seems to have come of it, records show.

By mid-August, he said he was visualizing “people that were not there,” according to case notes. At first, he was acting more aggressively, once flicking water at a guard through a hole in his cell door. But his energy ebbed, and he gradually migrated downward — from standing to bunk to floor.

“I’m having a breakdown,” he confided to a Wexford employee.

At the time, inmates in Illinois were required to declare an official hunger strike before prison officials would initiate protocols, including blood testing or forced feedings. But when a guard asked Mr. Johnson why he would not eat, he said he was “fasting,” as opposed to starving himself, and no action seems to have been taken.

‘Tell me this is OK!’

Lt. Matthew Morrison, one of the few people at Danville to take a personal interest in Mr. Johnson, reported seeing a white rind around his mouth in early September. He told other staff members the cell gave off “a death smell,” according to a deposition.

On Sept. 5, they moved Mr. Johnson to one of six cells adjacent to the prison’s small, bare-bones infirmary. Prison officials finally placed him on the official hunger strike protocol without his consent.

Mr. Morrison, in his deposition, said he was troubled by the inaction of the Wexford staff, and the lack of urgency exhibited by the medical director, Dr. Justin Young.

On Sept. 5, Mr. Morrison approached Dr. Young to express his concerns, and the doctor agreed to order blood and urine tests. But Dr. Young lived in Chicago, and was on site at the prison about four times a week, according to Mr. Kaplan. Friday, Sept. 6, 2019, was not one of those days.

Mr. Morrison arrived at work that morning, expecting to find Mr. Johnson’s testing underway. A Wexford nurse told him Dr. Young believed the tests could wait.

Mr. Morrison, stunned, asked her to call Dr. Young.

“He’s good till Monday,” Dr. Young responded, according to Mr. Morrison.

“Come on, come on, look at this guy! You tell me this is OK!” the officer responded.

Eventually, Justin Duprey, a licensed nurse practitioner and the most senior Wexford employee on duty that day, authorized the test himself.

Mr. Morrison, thinking he had averted a disaster, entered the cell and implored Mr. Johnson into taking the tests. He refused.

So prison officials obtained approval to remove him forcibly from his cell.

‘Oh, my God’

What happened next is documented in video taken from cameras held by officers on the extraction team and obtained by The Times through a court order.

Mr. Johnson is scarcely recognizable as the neatly groomed 21-year-old captured in a cellphone picture a few months earlier. His skin is ashen, eyes fixed on the middle distance. He might be 40. Or 60.

At first, he places his hands forward through the hole in his cell door to be cuffed. This is against procedure, the officers shout. His hands must be in back.

He will not, or cannot, comply. He wanders to the rear of his cell and falls hard. Two blasts of pepper spray barely elicit a reaction. The leader of the tactical team later said he found it unusual and unnerving.

The next video is in the medical unit. A shield is pressed to his chest. He is in agony, begging for them to stop, as two nurses attempt to insert a catheter.

Then they move him, half-conscious and limp, onto a wheelchair for the blood draw.

For the next 20 minutes, the Wexford nurse performing the procedure, Angelica Wachtor, jabs hands and arms to find a vessel that will hold shape. She winces with each puncture, tries to comfort him, and grows increasingly rattled.

“Oh, my God,” she mutters, and asks why help is not on the way.

She did not request assistance or discuss calling 911, records indicate.

“Can you please stop — it’s burning real bad,” Mr. Johnson said.

Soon after, a member of the tactical team reminds Ms. Wachtor to take Mr. Johnson’s vitals before taking him back to his cell. She would later tell Dr. Young she had been unable to able to obtain his blood pressure.

“You good?” one of the team members asks as they are preparing to leave.

“Yeah, I’ll have to be,” she replies in the recording.

Officers lifted him back onto his bunk, leaving him unconscious and naked except for a covering draped over his groin. His expressionless face is visible through the window on the cell door as it closes.

‘Cardiac arrest.’

Mr. Duprey, the nurse practitioner, had been sitting inside his office after corrections staff ordered him to shelter for his own protection, he said. When he emerged, he found Ms. Wachtor sobbing, and after a delay, he was let into the cell. Finding no pulse, Mr. Duprey asked a prison employee to call 911 so Mr. Johnson could be taken to a local emergency room.

The Wexford staff initiated CPR. It did not work.

At 3:38 p.m., the paramedics declared Markus Mison Johnson dead.

Afterward, a senior official at Danville called the Johnson family to say he had died of “cardiac arrest.”

Lisa Johnson pressed for more information, but none was initially forthcoming. She would soon receive a box hastily crammed with his possessions: uneaten snacks, notebooks, an inspirational memoir by a man who had served 20 years at Leavenworth.

Later, Shiping Bao, the coroner who examined his body, determined Mr. Johnson had died of severe dehydration. He told the state police it “was one of the driest bodies he had ever seen.”

For a long time, Ms. Johnson blamed herself. She says that her biggest mistake was assuming that the state, with all its resources, would provide a level of care comparable to what she had been able to provide her son.

She had stopped accepting foster care children while she was raising Markus and his siblings. But as the months dragged on, she decided her once-boisterous house had become oppressively still, and let local agencies know she was available again.

“It is good to have children around,” she said. “It was too quiet around here.”

Read by Glenn Thrush

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro .

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice. He joined The Times in 2017 after working for Politico, Newsday, Bloomberg News, The New York Daily News, The Birmingham Post-Herald and City Limits. More about Glenn Thrush

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