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“The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane: A Critical Analysis

“The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane, first published in 1897, is based on Crane’s own experiences as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War۔

Introduction: “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Table of Contents

“The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane, first published in 1897, is based on Crane’s own experiences as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War, when he and three other men were stranded at sea for over thirty hours after their ship sank off the coast of Florida. The story follows the four men – the correspondent, the captain, the cook, and the oiler – as they struggle to survive in a small dinghy in the midst of a raging sea. The story is known for its vivid and realistic portrayal of the men’s struggle against the forces of nature, as well as for its exploration of themes such as the meaning of life, the insignificance of humanity in the face of nature, and the relationship between humans and the natural world. “The Open Boat” is widely regarded as a masterpiece of American literature and is considered one of the greatest short stories ever written.

Main Events in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

The story opens with four men – the correspondent, the captain, the cook, and the oiler – stranded in a small dinghy in the middle of the ocean after their ship sinks.
The men work together to try to keep the dinghy afloat, bailing out water and using oars to steer.
They see a lighthouse in the distance and hope to reach it, but the waves are too strong and they are forced to turn back.
They are hit by a large wave that capsizes the boat, but they manage to right it and continue on.
The men begin to feel a sense of desperation and hopelessness, as they realize that they may not be rescued and that they are at the mercy of the sea.
They see a man on the shore, but he does not see them and they are unable to attract his attention.
As night falls, the men take turns rowing and sleeping, but they are all exhausted and suffering from hunger and thirst.
The men are briefly elated when they spot a rescue boat, but their hopes are dashed when the boat passes them by without noticing them.
The men continue to struggle against the elements, facing numerous close calls and setbacks, until they finally reach shore and are rescued.
The story ends with the men reflecting on their experience and their place in the universe, and pondering the meaning of life in the face of the indifferent forces of nature.

Literary Devices in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Allusion : The men’s situation is compared to that of ancient mariners, such as Odysseus, who also had to fight to survive on the open sea. This reference serves to add depth and resonance to the men’s struggle, connecting them to a long tradition of sea-faring adventurers.
Epiphany : The men’s experience on the open sea leads them to reflect on their place in the universe and the meaning of life, culminating in a moment of epiphany at the end of the story. This moment of realization adds a sense of profundity and meaning to the men’s struggle, suggesting that even in the face of great adversity, there can be moments of transcendent insight.
Foreshadowing : The men’s sense of desperation and hopelessness early in the story foreshadows the challenges they will face later on. This device serves to build tension and anticipation in the reader, creating a sense of foreboding about what is to come.
Imagery : The story is full of vivid, sensory descriptions of the ocean, the sky, and the men’s physical surroundings, which help to create a powerful sense of atmosphere. This device serves to immerse the reader in the story, making them feel as if they are actually there with the men on the open boat.
Irony : The men are surrounded by water, but are unable to drink it due to its saltiness. This device serves to highlight the cruel and ironic nature of their situation, emphasizing the men’s vulnerability and powerlessness in the face of the natural world.
Juxtaposition : The men’s struggle for survival is contrasted with the peaceful and unchanging nature of the natural world around them. This device serves to underscore the men’s isolation and insignificance, emphasizing the vastness and indifference of the natural world.
Metaphor : The sea is described as “an enemy” that is “cold and hostile” towards the men. This device serves to personify the sea, giving it a sense of agency and intentionality, and emphasizing its threatening and malevolent nature.
Pathos : The story evokes a strong sense of pity and sympathy for the men, who are portrayed as vulnerable and helpless in the face of nature. This device serves to make the reader emotionally invested in the men’s struggle, creating a sense of urgency and empathy.
Personification : The sea is personified throughout the story, as if it has a will of its own and is actively working against the men. This device serves to give the sea a sense of personality and character, emphasizing its role as a malevolent and unpredictable force.
Point of view : The story is told from a third-person limited point of view, focusing mainly on the experiences and perspectives of the correspondent. This device serves to give the reader a sense of intimacy and immediacy with the men’s struggle, while also maintaining a certain distance and objectivity.
Repetition : The phrase “If I am going to be drowned” is repeated several times throughout the story, emphasizing the men’s fear of death and their struggle to survive. This device serves to create a sense of urgency and tension, highlighting the men’s desperation and the stakes of their situation.
Simile : The waves are compared to “monstrous vermin” and “sardonic devils,” emphasizing their threatening and malevolent nature. This device serves to create a vivid and visceral sense of the waves, emphasizing their power and hostility.
Suspense: The story is full of moments of suspense and tension, as the men face numerous

Characterization in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

The Correspondent: The correspondent is the main character of the story and serves as its narrator. He is a journalist who is stranded on the boat with the other three men. He is depicted as thoughtful and reflective, often musing on the nature of their situation and the meaning of life. He is also a bit of an outsider among the other men, due to his profession and his tendency to keep to himself.
The Oiler: The oiler is the strongest and most capable of the men on the boat. He is depicted as stoic and uncomplaining, and is responsible for rowing the boat. He is also the most optimistic of the men, believing that they will be rescued soon. He is the only character in the story who is given a name, Billie.
The Cook: The cook is depicted as a somewhat bumbling and ineffectual character, who is prone to complaining and grumbling. He is responsible for cooking the meals and keeping the men’s spirits up, but is not particularly good at either task. He is also the least optimistic of the men, often expressing doubts about their chances of survival.
The Captain: The captain is a shadowy figure who is never fully described or characterized. He is only mentioned briefly in the story, but his presence is felt throughout, as the men constantly look to him for guidance and direction. He represents the authority and expertise that the men lack, and his absence underscores their isolation and vulnerability.

Major Themes in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Nature is presented as a vast, uncaring force. The sea is described as having “lines of wind-ridged seas” and the men face relentless waves and exposure.
Despite the overwhelming odds, the men exhibit an unwavering will to survive. They row tirelessly and support one another, demonstrating human resilience even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
This contrast highlights both the insignificance of human striving against nature’s power and the remarkable determination of the human spirit.
The men come from varied backgrounds (correspondent, captain, oiler, cook), yet a bond of brotherhood emerges through their shared ordeal.
The oiler, who tirelessly labors at the oars, earns admiration, suggesting a degree of respect that transcends their social differences.
However, social hierarchies aren’t entirely dissolved. The captain maintains command, and his directions go unchallenged. This suggests that even in extreme situations, the remnants of social structures persist.
Faced with their own mortality, the men confront the seeming absurdity of existence. The correspondent observes, “A high, cold star on a winter’s night is the word he feels that she says to him” implying nature’s vast indifference toward their struggle.
The question hangs over the story: Is survival a meaningless struggle against inevitable oblivion, or can meaning be found within the act of striving itself?
The men initially believe they can control their fate through skill and strength. Yet, the sinking of the ship reveals the fragility of their illusions.
The ocean constantly undermines their efforts: “a wave took this boat upon its back and flung it skyward.” The story emphasizes the ultimate inability of humans to fully control their own destinies in the face of nature’s forces.

Additional Notes:

These themes are interconnected, creating a complex and nuanced exploration of the human experience.
The story lacks a definitive resolution, leaving the reader to ponder these thematic questions without clear answers.

Writing Style in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

The writing style in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane is characterized by its spare, economical prose and its vivid descriptions of the natural world. The story is written in a highly objective, journalistic style, with a focus on concrete details and a minimum of authorial commentary or interpretation. This style creates a sense of immediacy and realism, immersing the reader in the experience of the characters and their struggle for survival. At the same time, Crane’s use of metaphor and symbolism lends the story a deeper resonance, allowing it to explore universal themes of human experience and the relationship between humanity and nature. Overall, Crane’s writing style is both vivid and understated, conveying both the physical realities of the characters’ situation and the deeper emotional and philosophical questions it raises.

Literary Theories and Interpretation of “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Questions and thesis statements about “the open boat” by stephen crane.

What is the role of nature in “The Open Boat”?
Thesis statement: In “The Open Boat,” nature is portrayed as an indifferent and powerful force that shapes the lives of the characters, highlighting the limitations of human agency and the inevitability of mortality.
How does the story explore the theme of existentialism?
Thesis statement: Through its depiction of the characters’ struggle to find meaning in a chaotic and indifferent world, “The Open Boat” can be seen as a meditation on the themes of human existence and the search for purpose in the face of adversity.
How does Crane use symbolism in “The Open Boat”?
Thesis statement: Through his use of various symbolic images, such as the waves and the boat itself, Crane imbues “The Open Boat” with a deeper resonance, exploring universal themes of humanity’s relationship to nature and the struggle for survival.
How does the story challenge traditional narrative structures?
Thesis statement: With its fragmented structure and lack of closure, “The Open Boat” can be seen as a postmodern exploration of the subjective and contingent nature of human experience, challenging traditional narrative structures and highlighting the fluidity of meaning.

Short Questions and Answers about “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

What is the significance of the title “The Open Boat”?
The title “The Open Boat” refers to the central setting of the story, a small dinghy adrift in the open sea. The title highlights the vulnerability and exposure of the characters to the elements, emphasizing their isolation and the overwhelming power of nature. The title also suggests the symbolic significance of the boat as a metaphor for the human condition, adrift in an indifferent and unpredictable world.
How does the story use sensory imagery to create a sense of atmosphere and mood?
Crane’s vivid descriptions of the sea and sky create a vivid sense of atmosphere and mood throughout the story. He uses sensory imagery to convey the characters’ physical and emotional experiences, such as the sound of the waves and the sensation of cold and wetness. These descriptions create a sense of realism and immediacy, immersing the reader in the characters’ struggle for survival.
How does the story address the theme of human mortality?
The theme of human mortality is central to “The Open Boat,” as the characters are confronted with the prospect of death throughout the story. The characters are forced to confront the fragility and transience of human life in the face of the overwhelming power of nature. This theme is underscored by the story’s tragic conclusion, in which the characters are left to ponder the existential significance of their ordeal.
How does the story explore the concept of human agency?
“The Open Boat” can be seen as a meditation on the limits of human agency in the face of an indifferent and unpredictable world. Despite their efforts to control their fate, the characters are ultimately at the mercy of the forces of nature. This theme is reflected in the story’s fragmented and episodic structure, which highlights the characters’ lack of control and the chaotic nature of their experience.

Literary Works Similar to “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway: This novella resonates with Crane’s work through its exploration of humanity’s struggle against the overpowering forces of nature. Both feature isolated protagonists demonstrating extraordinary resilience and a complex relationship with their environment.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Coleridge’s epic poem shares the theme of survival against insurmountable odds. Like “The Open Boat,” it explores the psychological and existential tolls of a harrowing ordeal, questioning fate and meaning within a larger, seemingly indifferent universe.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: Both narratives embark on journeys into dangerous, uncharted territories that expose the dark underbelly of the human psyche. They challenge notions of progress, civilization, and the fragility of conventional morality under extreme pressure.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel: Martel’s contemporary novel delves into themes of survival at sea, questioning the very nature of reality and its perception. Like “The Open Boat,” it challenges the reader to confront ambiguity and the search for meaning after profound adversity.
Existentialist Short Fiction: Works like Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” or Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” similarly grapple with the absurdity of existence, human isolation, and the desperate need to derive meaning within an indifferent world, themes that find strong parallels in “The Open Boat”.

Scholarly Journal Article

Gullason, Thomas A. “Thematic Patterns in Stephen Crane’s Early Novels.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction , vol 10, no. 1, 1955, pp 69-77. JSTOR. [invalid URL removed] (Examines recurring motifs and thematic concerns within Crane’s early fiction, situating “The Open Boat” within his broader literary output. Likely requires an academic database subscription)

Further Research Resources

LitCharts: The Open Boat. LitCharts, https://www.litcharts.com (Provides detailed summaries, analysis, and contextualization of the story)
The Stephen Crane Society – [invalid URL removed] (A dedicated society offering scholarly articles, news, and resources for in-depth Crane studies).

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The Open Boat

Stephen crane, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

“The Open Boat” primarily centers on the dynamic between humankind and nature. Humankind is represented by the four men in the boat: the correspondent , the captain , the cook , and the oiler . The men try to prevail over nature, but nature clearly has full control over them. The story is careful to point out the way that nature’s control is not due to any particular concern or contempt for the men. Instead, nature is completely indifferent to humankind, placing “The Open Boat” squarely within a literary movement known as American naturalism. Somewhat of an offshoot of realism, American naturalism is marked by themes of survival, determinism (the idea that humans can’t change their fate), and, most notably, nature’s indifference to humans.

“The Open Boat” demonstrates repeatedly that humans have no control over nature, despite their best efforts to overcome it. Throughout the story, the four men must fight against nature for their survival by navigating their tiny lifeboat through rough waters—a fight they are clearly not winning. This process drains them of their energy and spirit, leaving them like “mummies.” The men are at the mercy of nature. Whereas on land humans demonstrate their power over the natural world by branding animals, at sea these helpless men are themselves “branded” by nature: “The spray, when it dashed uproariously over the side, made the voyagers shrink and swear like men who were being branded.” Thus, at sea, the illusion of man’s control over nature is shown to be false, as nature violently asserts its dominance over the voyagers like a man branding a cow.

This man-versus-nature dynamic is also reflected in a reference to Caroline E. S. Norton’s poem, “Bingers on the Rhine.” As the correspondent rows against the violent sea, he remembers the poem, which he heard in his youth, about a dying soldier who tries in vain to keep from bleeding to death by holding his hand over his heart. The soldier’s attempt to fight against his imminent death is fruitless. Similarly, the narrator notes that nature (and consequently fate) has the power to drown humans, and all a person can do in the face of this very real threat is “shake his fist at the clouds” and curse his fate (which is as ineffective a response as the soldier clutching his chest to keep from dying).

The narrator writes that the four men in the tiny, ten-foot boat are “at the mercy of five oceans,” further emphasizing the staggering difference in size and power between nature and mankind. When the correspondent catches sight of a shark next to the boat one night, the narrator likens it to deathly weaponry with a mix of horror and fascination: “The speed and power of the thing was greatly to be admired. It cut through the water like a gigantic and keen projectile.” Even nature in its seemingly most harmless form has complete control over man; when a seagull lands on the captain, he can’t shoo it away for fear of capsizing the boat with his vigorous movements. Instead, the captain must reluctantly sit and bear it, allowing the bird to sit on his head for as long as it likes.

Though nature has complete control over humankind, it is ultimately indifferent to them—neither in favor of or against them. For example, elements of nature both help and hinder the men’s progress toward shore: “A changed tide tried to force them southward, but the wind and wave said northward.” Likewise, waves growl like menacing wild animals and then are subdued. The waves’ temperament shifts constantly, without any regard for the words and actions of the four men on the tiny lifeboat. In the ultimate show of indifference, a large wave capsizes the boat (setting in motion the events leading up to the oiler’s death), but another large wave propels the correspondent safely to shore. Nature’s indifference toward the men continues after they’ve reached land, as the “indifferent shore” has two different “welcomes” for them. For the correspondent, the cook, and the captain, the shore means safety and survival while for the oiler the shore offers only the “sinister hospitality of the grave.” Nature didn’t specifically target the oiler or try to save the other three men. Ultimately, the correspondent realizes that nature is not “cruel,” “beneficent,” “treacherous,” or “wise.” Instead, the story affirms that nature is “indifferent, flatly indifferent,” and that humans are insignificant and small in comparison to nature’s vastness. In this way, Crane encourages his readers to let go of their human pride and feel humbled by nature’s vastness and power.

Humans vs. Nature ThemeTracker

Humans vs. Nature Quotes in The Open Boat

The correspondent thought that he had been drenched to the skin, but happening to feel in the top pocket of his coat, he found therein eight cigars. Four of them were soaked with sea-water; four were perfectly scathless.

If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I way about to nibble the sacred cheese of life?

For it was certainly an abominable injustice to drown a man who had worked so hard, so hard. The man felt it would be a crime most unnatural. Other people had drowned at sea since galleys swarmed with painted sails, but still—

Suffering, Survival, Empathy, and Community Theme Icon

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important…he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.

He has never considered it his affair that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, nor had it appeared to him as a matter for sorrow. It was less to him than the breaking of a pencil’s point. Now, however, it quaintly came to him as a human, living thing.

Later, carmine and gold was painted upon the waters. The morning appeared finally, in its splendor, with a sky of pure blue, and the sunlight flamed on the tips of the waves.

A man in this situation […] should see the innumerable flaws of his life, and have them taste wickedly in his mind and wish for another chance. A distinction between right and wrong seems absurdly clear to him […] and he understands that if he were given another opportunity he would mend his conduct and his words, and be better and brighter during an introduction or at a tea.

When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.

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How to Write a Strong Thesis Statement: 4 Steps + Examples

What’s Covered:

What is the purpose of a thesis statement, writing a good thesis statement: 4 steps, common pitfalls to avoid, where to get your essay edited for free.

When you set out to write an essay, there has to be some kind of point to it, right? Otherwise, your essay would just be a big jumble of word salad that makes absolutely no sense. An essay needs a central point that ties into everything else. That main point is called a thesis statement, and it’s the core of any essay or research paper.

You may hear about Master degree candidates writing a thesis, and that is an entire paper–not to be confused with the thesis statement, which is typically one sentence that contains your paper’s focus.

Read on to learn more about thesis statements and how to write them. We’ve also included some solid examples for you to reference.

Typically the last sentence of your introductory paragraph, the thesis statement serves as the roadmap for your essay. When your reader gets to the thesis statement, they should have a clear outline of your main point, as well as the information you’ll be presenting in order to either prove or support your point.

The thesis statement should not be confused for a topic sentence , which is the first sentence of every paragraph in your essay. If you need help writing topic sentences, numerous resources are available. Topic sentences should go along with your thesis statement, though.

Since the thesis statement is the most important sentence of your entire essay or paper, it’s imperative that you get this part right. Otherwise, your paper will not have a good flow and will seem disjointed. That’s why it’s vital not to rush through developing one. It’s a methodical process with steps that you need to follow in order to create the best thesis statement possible.

Step 1: Decide what kind of paper you’re writing

When you’re assigned an essay, there are several different types you may get. Argumentative essays are designed to get the reader to agree with you on a topic. Informative or expository essays present information to the reader. Analytical essays offer up a point and then expand on it by analyzing relevant information. Thesis statements can look and sound different based on the type of paper you’re writing. For example:

Argumentative: The United States needs a viable third political party to decrease bipartisanship, increase options, and help reduce corruption in government.
Informative: The Libertarian party has thrown off elections before by gaining enough support in states to get on the ballot and by taking away crucial votes from candidates.
Analytical: An analysis of past presidential elections shows that while third party votes may have been the minority, they did affect the outcome of the elections in 2020, 2016, and beyond.

Step 2: Figure out what point you want to make

Once you know what type of paper you’re writing, you then need to figure out the point you want to make with your thesis statement, and subsequently, your paper. In other words, you need to decide to answer a question about something, such as:

What impact did reality TV have on American society?
How has the musical Hamilton affected perception of American history?
Why do I want to major in [chosen major here]?

If you have an argumentative essay, then you will be writing about an opinion. To make it easier, you may want to choose an opinion that you feel passionate about so that you’re writing about something that interests you. For example, if you have an interest in preserving the environment, you may want to choose a topic that relates to that.

If you’re writing your college essay and they ask why you want to attend that school, you may want to have a main point and back it up with information, something along the lines of:

“Attending Harvard University would benefit me both academically and professionally, as it would give me a strong knowledge base upon which to build my career, develop my network, and hopefully give me an advantage in my chosen field.”

Step 3: Determine what information you’ll use to back up your point

Once you have the point you want to make, you need to figure out how you plan to back it up throughout the rest of your essay. Without this information, it will be hard to either prove or argue the main point of your thesis statement. If you decide to write about the Hamilton example, you may decide to address any falsehoods that the writer put into the musical, such as:

“The musical Hamilton, while accurate in many ways, leaves out key parts of American history, presents a nationalist view of founding fathers, and downplays the racism of the times.”

Once you’ve written your initial working thesis statement, you’ll then need to get information to back that up. For example, the musical completely leaves out Benjamin Franklin, portrays the founding fathers in a nationalist way that is too complimentary, and shows Hamilton as a staunch abolitionist despite the fact that his family likely did own slaves.

Step 4: Revise and refine your thesis statement before you start writing

Read through your thesis statement several times before you begin to compose your full essay. You need to make sure the statement is ironclad, since it is the foundation of the entire paper. Edit it or have a peer review it for you to make sure everything makes sense and that you feel like you can truly write a paper on the topic. Once you’ve done that, you can then begin writing your paper.

When writing a thesis statement, there are some common pitfalls you should avoid so that your paper can be as solid as possible. Make sure you always edit the thesis statement before you do anything else. You also want to ensure that the thesis statement is clear and concise. Don’t make your reader hunt for your point. Finally, put your thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph and have your introduction flow toward that statement. Your reader will expect to find your statement in its traditional spot.

If you’re having trouble getting started, or need some guidance on your essay, there are tools available that can help you. CollegeVine offers a free peer essay review tool where one of your peers can read through your essay and provide you with valuable feedback. Getting essay feedback from a peer can help you wow your instructor or college admissions officer with an impactful essay that effectively illustrates your point.

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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Crafting a Powerful Thesis Statement for a Movie Review: Examples and Tips

backlinkworks
Writing Articles & Reviews
October 28, 2023

Introduction

writing a movie review can be an exciting task, but IT requires careful consideration and thought. One of the most important elements of a movie review is the thesis statement, as IT sets the tone and direction for the entire review. In this article, we will explore the process of crafting a powerful thesis statement for a movie review, providing you with helpful examples and tips along the way.

What is a Thesis Statement in a Movie Review?

A thesis statement in a movie review presents the main argument or opinion that you will be discussing and supporting throughout your review. IT typically appears near the end of your introduction and should be clear, concise, and thought-provoking. The thesis statement should provide an overall evaluation or interpretation of the movie, highlighting the key aspects you will be focusing on in your review.

Examples of Powerful Thesis Statements

Let’s now explore some examples of powerful thesis statements to give you a better understanding of how to structure your own. Remember, these examples are not meant to be copied directly but rather to serve as inspiration for crafting your unique thesis statement:

Example 1: The movie “Inception” explores the convoluted depths of the human mind, challenging our perception of reality and leaving audiences questioning the nature of dreams.
Example 2: Through its stunning cinematography and emotional storytelling, “The Shawshank Redemption” showcases the resilience of the human spirit and the power of hope in the face of adversity.
Example 3: In “Black Swan,” the director delves into the dark and obsessive world of ballet, blurring the lines between sanity and insanity, leading to a mesmerizing and haunting cinematic experience.

Tips for Crafting a Powerful Thesis Statement

Now that you’ve seen some examples, let’s dive into some tips to help you craft a powerful thesis statement for your movie review:

Identify the central theme: Analyze the movie and identify the central theme or message being conveyed. This will serve as the basis for your thesis statement.
Be specific: Make your thesis statement clear and specific, avoiding vague language or generalizations. This will make your argument more compelling and focused.
Consider the audience: Think about the intended audience of your review and tailor your thesis statement to resonate with them. Different audiences may have varying expectations or interests.
Support with evidence: Your thesis statement should be supported by evidence from the movie. Incorporate specific scenes, dialogues, or character developments to strengthen your argument.
Stay objective: While expressing your personal opinion is essential, ensure that your thesis statement remains objective and balanced. Avoid overly biased language that may detract from the credibility of your review.

Crafting a powerful thesis statement for a movie review is crucial in setting the tone and direction for your review. IT should provide a clear evaluation or interpretation of the movie, supported by evidence and examples. By following the tips outlined in this article and considering the provided examples, you can create a compelling thesis statement that engages your readers and enhances the overall quality of your movie review.

1. Can I include my personal opinion in the thesis statement?

Yes, you can include your personal opinion in the thesis statement, but ensure that IT remains objective and supported by evidence from the movie.

2. Should I mention the title of the movie in my thesis statement?

While IT is not mandatory, IT is recommended to include the title of the movie in your thesis statement to provide clarity and context.

3. How long should my thesis statement be?

A thesis statement should be concise and to the point. Aim for a sentence or two that effectively conveys your main argument.

4. Can I change my thesis statement after writing the review?

Yes, IT is possible to make adjustments to your thesis statement if you feel IT needs refinement or modification based on your analysis and review process.

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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

This is an accordion element with a series of buttons that open and close related content panels.

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

Think of yourself as a member of a jury, listening to a lawyer who is presenting an opening argument. You'll want to know very soon whether the lawyer believes the accused to be guilty or not guilty, and how the lawyer plans to convince you. Readers of academic essays are like jury members: before they have read too far, they want to know what the essay argues as well as how the writer plans to make the argument. After reading your thesis statement, the reader should think, "This essay is going to try to convince me of something. I'm not convinced yet, but I'm interested to see how I might be."

An effective thesis cannot be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." A thesis is not a topic; nor is it a fact; nor is it an opinion. "Reasons for the fall of communism" is a topic. "Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe" is a fact known by educated people. "The fall of communism is the best thing that ever happened in Europe" is an opinion. (Superlatives like "the best" almost always lead to trouble. It's impossible to weigh every "thing" that ever happened in Europe. And what about the fall of Hitler? Couldn't that be "the best thing"?)

A good thesis has two parts. It should tell what you plan to argue, and it should "telegraph" how you plan to argue—that is, what particular support for your claim is going where in your essay.

Steps in Constructing a Thesis

First, analyze your primary sources. Look for tension, interest, ambiguity, controversy, and/or complication. Does the author contradict himself or herself? Is a point made and later reversed? What are the deeper implications of the author's argument? Figuring out the why to one or more of these questions, or to related questions, will put you on the path to developing a working thesis. (Without the why, you probably have only come up with an observation—that there are, for instance, many different metaphors in such-and-such a poem—which is not a thesis.)

Once you have a working thesis, write it down. There is nothing as frustrating as hitting on a great idea for a thesis, then forgetting it when you lose concentration. And by writing down your thesis you will be forced to think of it clearly, logically, and concisely. You probably will not be able to write out a final-draft version of your thesis the first time you try, but you'll get yourself on the right track by writing down what you have.

Keep your thesis prominent in your introduction. A good, standard place for your thesis statement is at the end of an introductory paragraph, especially in shorter (5-15 page) essays. Readers are used to finding theses there, so they automatically pay more attention when they read the last sentence of your introduction. Although this is not required in all academic essays, it is a good rule of thumb.

Anticipate the counterarguments. Once you have a working thesis, you should think about what might be said against it. This will help you to refine your thesis, and it will also make you think of the arguments that you'll need to refute later on in your essay. (Every argument has a counterargument. If yours doesn't, then it's not an argument—it may be a fact, or an opinion, but it is not an argument.)

This statement is on its way to being a thesis. However, it is too easy to imagine possible counterarguments. For example, a political observer might believe that Dukakis lost because he suffered from a "soft-on-crime" image. If you complicate your thesis by anticipating the counterargument, you'll strengthen your argument, as shown in the sentence below.

Some Caveats and Some Examples

A thesis is never a question. Readers of academic essays expect to have questions discussed, explored, or even answered. A question ("Why did communism collapse in Eastern Europe?") is not an argument, and without an argument, a thesis is dead in the water.

A thesis is never a list. "For political, economic, social and cultural reasons, communism collapsed in Eastern Europe" does a good job of "telegraphing" the reader what to expect in the essay—a section about political reasons, a section about economic reasons, a section about social reasons, and a section about cultural reasons. However, political, economic, social and cultural reasons are pretty much the only possible reasons why communism could collapse. This sentence lacks tension and doesn't advance an argument. Everyone knows that politics, economics, and culture are important.

A thesis should never be vague, combative or confrontational. An ineffective thesis would be, "Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe because communism is evil." This is hard to argue (evil from whose perspective? what does evil mean?) and it is likely to mark you as moralistic and judgmental rather than rational and thorough. It also may spark a defensive reaction from readers sympathetic to communism. If readers strongly disagree with you right off the bat, they may stop reading.

An effective thesis has a definable, arguable claim. "While cultural forces contributed to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the disintegration of economies played the key role in driving its decline" is an effective thesis sentence that "telegraphs," so that the reader expects the essay to have a section about cultural forces and another about the disintegration of economies. This thesis makes a definite, arguable claim: that the disintegration of economies played a more important role than cultural forces in defeating communism in Eastern Europe. The reader would react to this statement by thinking, "Perhaps what the author says is true, but I am not convinced. I want to read further to see how the author argues this claim."

A thesis should be as clear and specific as possible. Avoid overused, general terms and abstractions. For example, "Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe because of the ruling elite's inability to address the economic concerns of the people" is more powerful than "Communism collapsed due to societal discontent."

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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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Naturalism in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane Essay (Critical Writing)

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Works cited.

The term naturalism describes a type of literature that uses scientific principles in its study of human beings. Naturalism is more of a philosophical position in which characters are studied through their relationship with their surroundings. According to naturalistic writers, human beings are ruled by their instincts and passions and by forces of heredity and environment. One of the major naturalist writers of 19 th century America is Stephen Crane. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was strongly influenced by naturalism, and his writings show a great respect for environment as controlling force. Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat revolves around four shipwrecked men: the captain, the cook, the correspondent, and the oiler. Nature is the main character in the story because each of the four men tries hard not to make it angry or to disturb it. The men would ask the sea for mercy, pleading with it to let them pass safely. The story is about coming to terms with the harsh universe. Thesis: In his short story “The Open Boat” Stephen Crane expresses naturalism through three characteristics: portraying nature as all powerful, showing the sea as uncaring and by making use of natural things as animals and birds as metaphors and similes in his prose.

Throughout the story, Stephen Crane seems to suggest that the fate of the four men is pre-determined by nature and that they had no control over their own lives. The story begins amidst hopelessness and chaos. The sea is stormy and the waves are dashing. The four men could only look in awe. They could not navigate the ship to their desires. When the captain of the ship asks whether they have much of a show, the three remain silent, expressing no optimism at all. “Oh, well,” said the captain, soothing his children, “we’ll get ashore all right” (Crane 5). But there was that in his tone which made them think; so the oiler quoth, “Yes! if this wind holds.” The cook was bailing. “Yes! if we don’t catch hell in the surf.”” (Crane 5).

This line indicates that there is no help from God. According to Naturalism, someone born or thrown into a desperate circumstance must rely solely upon themselves to survive. Here, when the captain expresses an optimistic statement, he tells it in a depressed voice. In fact, he is only trying to reduce the fears of the other three men in the boat like a father trying to soothe his children. But the tone of his voice raises doubts in the minds of the other men. The oiler says they might reach the shore if the wind holds and the cook adds if they don’t get caught in the waves. Thus the danger of the wind and the waves – natural forces – are so awesome – that without their help, the men feel there is no hope of getting to the shore. These lines show the indifference of nature, the forces of environment and an indifferent, deterministic universe. Together, these factors imply a sense of hopelessness in overcoming fate which is a major trait of naturalism.

As naturalist writers write, Crane portrays nature as uncaring in his descriptions of the unforgiving and relentless sea. He states at one point in his story that, “A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats” (Crane 1). Despite the fact that the men in the lifeboat are tired and that their death seems imminent if the sea does not let up, the sea continues on in wave after wave of relentless fatigue.

Nature, in this case the sea, is portrayed as uncaring. Even the tower is not simply “a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants” (Crane 2). It is God, standing with his back to men. To be “impressed with the unconcern of the universe” (Crane 2) implies that there is no kind God or religion resting at the center of the world. Man is alone, Crane says, having to depend solely on his own resources. Under such conditions man learns to rely on fellow human beings for survival. Crane tells us that though he had been taught to be cynical of men, his shared tragedy with the other three men forces him to form a comradeship. So sensitive they become to human suffering that the correspondent, recalling a childhood verse, feels sympathy for a dying soldier, one who does not even exist. All of this is the outcome of the uncaring sea that is a powerful symbol of naturalism.

Finally, true to the writing style of literary naturalism, Stephen Crane, in his story “The Open Boat” uses a number of figures of speech involving images drawn from nature make comparisons with land animals or objects. “Canton-flannel gulls flew near and far. Sometimes they sat down on the sea, near patches of brown seaweed that rolled over the waves with a movement like carpets on a line in a gale. The birds sat comfortably in groups, and they were envied by some in the dinghy, for the wrath of the sea was no more to them than it was to a covey of prairie chickens a thousand miles inland. Often they came very close and stared at the men with black bead-like eyes” (Crane 4).The waves seen against the horizon appear like jagged rocks. The bucking broncho comparison compares the ride in the boat to a wild ride on a horse (Crane 2). The snarling waves suggest a land animal of any kind that snarls. The crest of each wave is a hill. The sea gulls are like prairie chickens, and “it is easier to steal eggs from under a hen than it was to change seats in the dinghy” (Crane 2). These figures drawn from external nature serve to broaden the scope of the tale. What the men know at the end of the tale they learn from the sea, but the lesson is a lesson about the whole of life, about man’s relation to man and to nature.

Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat” is a good example of a story using a classical definition of literary naturalism. His story contains multiple situations and examples where the forces of nature are shown as being very powerful and uncaring. Crane does this effectively by using elements of nature in his writing style. He portrays the forces of nature as unconquerable to human beings who can only silently accept their fate. Second, he portrays the sea and hence nature as uncaring. It does not care about the suffering of the men. This is evident in the rare kind of comradeship the men develop in the absence of care from the universe. Third, the metaphors and similes Crane uses in narration are birds and animals. Thus Stephen Crane proves he is a naturalistic writer in his well known story “The Open Boat”.

Crane, Stephen (1897). The Open Boat. Scribner’s Magazine, XXI.

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The Process for Developing Thesis Statements for History : Home

Process for developing thesis statements for history, developing a thesis statement for history .

More than most other academic disciplines, History is focused on clear, organized, and developed writing. And the key fundamental to writing in History is to focus on developing the proper thesis from start to finish.

You can be much more efficient in your searches for research by narrowing down a topic from the very beginning with a working thesis.

For example: Your history teacher assigns a Portfolio Project about how the US ended up fighting for the Allies in World War I. The teacher prompts you by writing that the US could have fought for either the Allies or the Central power in World War I, but they ended up fighting for just the one. Why not the other? Or how remaining neutral in the war would have affected the eventual outcome. Take a position and argue which one was the better choice and why. Defend a strong position.

So, if you develop a working thesis out of this prompt you can immediately focus in on your position.

The essential elements of a proper History working thesis:

Asserts an historical argument - not a fact, but an ARGUMENT
Therefore, you are asserting a position that you have to defend .
Is historically focused and precise,
and ALWAYS answers the question, "so what?" Why should we care, TODAY?
Finally, your thesis should identify the main points that you are using to defend your position and will form the basis of every topic sentence in your body paragraphs. This part of the working thesis will take more time to develop.

The thesis statement can be up to three to four sentences and is expected to be at the end or your introduction.

The Finish:

Your working thesis stays with the writing project until you revise it for the VERY last time - right before submitting your whole paper. You want to make sure that is closely reflects your conclusion, which was written after you developed the body of the paper.

Remember: the very first thing that your reader will read is your introduction. First impressions are critically important. So, you will want to go back and update your thesis, which will be the end of your writing process.

Using the prompt above, here is a successful thesis:

Although the US entered World War I on the Allied side against Germany and the Central Power on April 6, 1917, the war had already been raging in Europe for three years. The largest ethnic group in the US were German, equating to 10% of the population; yet while a majority of the nation favored England, France and the other Allies--both groups highly favored US neutrality as the best approach. Therefore, had Germany not continue responding to the Allied blockade by indiscriminately sinking all ships, regardless of citizenship and cargo, the US would have stayed neutral, and the eventual tide of the war would have gone the other way - for the Central Powers.

These helpful tips were provided by James Meredith -

Last Updated: Jun 3, 2024 2:03 PM
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Your Mind Is Being Fracked

The historian of science d. graham burnett on what’s at stake in the rise of an extractive attention economy and how we can reclaim our attention..

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

I think a lot about the way we talk about attention. Because the way we talk about something is the way we think about it. What do you always hear about attention when you’re in school? Pay attention, as if we have a certain amount of attention in our mental wallet, and we have to spend it wisely. We need to use it to buy algebra, rather than buying gossip or jokes or daydreams.

I wish that was how my attention worked. It certainly did not work that way then. I graduated high school with a 2.2 because I cannot pay attention. I just can’t, to information delivered in the form of long lectures. I wish I could. I try. My attention, it just doesn’t feel to me like something I get to spend.

It feels — I don’t know. It feels more like taking my dogs on a walk. Sometimes they walk where I want them to. Sometimes I’m in control, and sometimes I am not in control. They walk where they want to. They get scared by thunder, and they try to run away.

Sometimes a dog side-eyes them from across the street, and they turn from mild-mannered terriers into killing machines. Sometimes they are obsessively trying to get a chicken bone. And even when I hurry them past it, they spend the whole rest of the walk clearly thinking about that chicken bone and scheming about how to get back there.

My attention feels like that to me. And this is what I don’t like about the way we talk about attention. We are not always in control of it. We may not even usually be in control of it. The context in which our attention plays out, what kinds of things are around us, it really matters. And it’s supposed to. Attention is supposed to be open to the world around us.

But that openness, it makes us subject to manipulation. You really see that now when you open your computer or your phone. It’s like the whole digital street is covered in chicken bones. There’s lightning cracking overhead. There are always dogs barking.

And I worry about this for my own mental habits, for my kids, for everybody’s kids. I don’t think we’re creating an intentionally healthy world here. And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this, and I keep feeling like we’re getting near it, but not quite there. Because the way we talk about attention, it just doesn’t feel rigorous enough to me. It doesn’t feel like it is getting at the experience of it well.

And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this, people who have found a better way to study attention or talk about it or teach it. Then I was reading this piece on attention in “The New Yorker” by Nathan Heller, and I came across D. Graham Burnett, who’s doing all three.

He’s a historian of science at Princeton University. He’s working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. And he’s a co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention, which is a kind of grassroots, artistic effort to create a curriculum around attention. And yeah, that got my attention. As always, my email, [email protected].

D. Graham Burnett, welcome to the show.

Oh, it’s such a pleasure to be here. Thanks.

So you’ve written that our attention is getting fracked. What do you mean by that?

Fracking. I suspect most of your listeners have heard that term. Fracking is mostly associated with this idea of getting petroleum resources out of the earth. But it’s a new technology for doing that. In the old days, pre major exploitation of petroleum resources, there were these big, juicy zits of high-value crude oil just sitting there in the earth, waiting to geyser up if you tapped them. Drill a hole — whew, gusher.

We’ve tapped all that out. The only way you can get the remaining petroleum and natural gas resources out of the deep earth is to pump down in there high pressure, high volume detergent, which forces up to the surface this kind of slurry, mixture of natural gas, crude oil, leftover detergent, and juice and nasty stuff, which you then separate out, and you get your monetizable crude.

This is a precise analogy to what’s happening to us in our contemporary attention economy. We have a, depending on who you ask, $500 billion, $3 trillion, $7 trillion industry, which, to get the money value of our attention out of us, is continuously pumping into our faces high-pressure, high-value detergent in the form of social media and non-stop content that holds us on our devices. And that pumping brings to the surface that spume, that foam of our attention, which can be aggregated and sold off to the highest bidder.

How do you define what attention is?

I would love for us to use this whole conversation to roll up on the shores of that deepest question again and again. So let me go at it one way. I’m in the process of finishing a history of science book about the laboratory study of this thing called attention since about 1880. In laboratories, using experiments, scientists have, since the late 19th century, sliced and diced a human capacity that they’ve called attention.

And it is that work that they did that has made it possible, I would argue, to price the thing called attention that we’re invoking when we use that fracking metaphor. It’s entangled with the idea of stimulus and response. The earliest experimental work on attention is about sitting folks in laboratory chairs and showing them certain kinds of displays, a cursor, a flash.

That triggering or targeting conception of attention has been the primary way that scientists, experimental psychologists, engineers, have conceptualized and placed in evidence a thing called attention. When they started doing early eye tracking experiments to follow where people’s gaze went, how much information they could take in at a glance, and figuring out how to quantify that — largely, it should be said, financed by friends in the emerging advertising industry — there was a kind of unholy symbiotic relationship that emerged between certain forms of experimental psychology and those who were trying to study how to sell mouthwash and cigarettes.

When those folks were doing that kind of work, they were certainly talking about a thing that was attention. They could call it attention. And it’s very similar to the thing that, right now, the most powerful computational technologies, the most sophisticated programmers and the most intricate algorithms are madly working to aggregate and auction continuously.

In your research, what’s been the holiest or most unholy attention experiment you’ve come across?

Oh, I love that question. Well, let’s do unholy. And maybe you’ll give me two. In the interwar period, a set of experiments called pursuit tests were used to train and assess the capability of military aviators. Pursuit tests were attention experiments, a little like forerunners of video games. Imagine a cursor that moves around on a non-computer screen. This is manual, like a clockwork cursor that’s traveling back and forth in front of you.

And you have a little envelope, a mechanical envelope that you have to move, manipulate kind of with a joystick, to keep bracketing that cursor as it moves around in front of you. And then we hook you up to a rebreather so that you’re gradually deprived of oxygen.

That’s a big twist. [LAUGHS] I didn’t see that one coming.

Yeah, we might also hook you up with headphones and run a lot of really loud and distracting noise through them. And we could also ask you to pedal or do other exhausting things with your body. There are a whole set of ways we could complicate this ecology. And then, as you gradually lose consciousness, you’re asked to continue for as long as you can, manipulating this envelope around the cursor.

This was understood to be an attentional test. It’s cybernetic, as you can see. It’s a way of integrating humans with machines. It uses attentionality as a way of measuring the kind of mechanization of the human subject in relation to a machine. Some people are better at it than others.

And let me assure you, if you’re going to put somebody in the cockpit of one of these very expensive fighter planes, you want somebody who’s really good at that. So I would call that one kind of an unholy — I mean, let’s be clear. I’m —

Yeah, fixating fighter pilots to see what happens to their attention. Yeah, I’ll categorize that in the unholy.

Yeah, I don’t want to sound paranoiac either. I’m in favor of fighter pilots who are able to pay attention —

Yes, I understand why they were doing it.

OK, yeah. Nevertheless, you can get a little shiver when you think about the way now, we’ve been, if you like, cybernetically integrated into our devices. And you can see aspects of that reality prefigured in the genealogy of experimental work on attention that I’m describing.

I’ll give you another one. The development during the Second World War of radar created unprecedented opportunities for defense capabilities in relation particularly to German U-Boats. Nevertheless, no matter how good your radar is, if the person looking at the radar screen isn’t paying attention to it, you’re totally screwed.

A really intense set of classified experiments took place during the Second World War to assess a very new problem — how long could people pay attention to screens? And what could you do to optimize their ability to keep paying attention to screens for long periods of time? That work gives rise to an understanding of the way people cease to pay attention, what comes to be called the vigilance decrement, the drop-off in vigilance to a statistically low frequency phenomenon.

And that work, too, can give you a little shiver to come to understand that there is, again, this deep, technoscientific story of studying a thing that we recognize as attention, but studying it in this highly instrumentalized way that is entirely bound to questions of stimulus and response, to triggering and targeting.

And we see the legacy of that kind of work, to this day, in the way we think about attention. That attention was sliced and diced in laboratories. And that very same thing is what’s now being priced with these calamitous effects in the way we experience ourselves.

I’m so interested by that form of attention. And it gets at something that has bothered me about a lot of the writing on attention and some of the conversations I’ve had on the show about attention, which is, it’s so wound up in this idea of attention as being something we should always have agency over.

I think that implicitly, in a lot of discussion of attention and a lot of research around attention, the attentional goal seems to emerge as a worker who never breaks focus on their task across the entire day. And so the enemy of attention in this telling is distraction. And I do feel that as a worker, right? I come in and I open my computer, and I immediately feel distracted by messages coming and Slacks and a million things.

And then, at the same time, that discourse, it points somewhere I’d like to go, but not the only place I’d like to go, right? I don’t imagine the good life as being a life where I have the attentional capacity of the perfect worker. Right? A lot of what I’m interested in theory with attention is, a sort of more open form of awareness, an ability to see other people more deeply.

And I’m a meditator. And so one thing I notice a lot, over time, is that what I think I should be paying attention to, and then what appears to come up with great value to me are not the same thing. Right? Too much agency over my attention, too much control is a way of not hearing other things in the world, too.

You put your finger on, really, the heart of the matter. So I want to suggest that part of what makes the conversation around attention right now, both so difficult and so important, is that secreted within that term are, in fact, two very different projects bumping up against each other.

In a laboratory, you use instruments. As it turns out, if you use instruments to get at a thing called attention, you end up finding an instrumentalized form of attention. Is that form of attention real? Absolutely. In fact, the technologies for making it real are powerful. You can quantify it. You can place it in evidence experimentally. Is it part of what’s in that sort of worker conception of attention that you invoked? Yes, as it happens, it is.

But that other thing that you’re kind of calling in when you talk about meditation, when you talk about awareness, when we invoke the sort of experience of being, the kind of ecstasy that can come with a certain durational flow of immersion in a person, a conversation, a book, the experience of reading, an object, that comes from a different place. It’s also in the language of attention, and it has its own separate history.

If you want to see both those operating now, let me give you two recent theorists of attention, both very prominent, whose accounts of what attention is are absolutely contradictory, perfectly paradoxical, but sort of both, interestingly, true. Two biz school theorists, Davenport and Beck, do a book called “The Attention Economy.” I think it’s 2001. They don’t actually coin the phrase, but they’re responsible for it sort of exploding into the collective conversation.

How do they define attention in that book? They say attention is what triggers, catalyzes, awareness into action. Attention is what catalyzes awareness into action. Definition that couldn’t be more different — the recently deceased French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, in a beautiful and difficult book called “Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations,” centers that book on attention.

What does he say attention is? He says, attention, playing with the “attendre” in French, is waiting, the exact opposite of catalytic triggering. It’s waiting. It’s, in fact, for him, infinite waiting. And what are you waiting on when you attend to an object? Wait on it. He says you’re waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in the object. Which long webs of connectedness are a mirroring of the rich, long webs of connectedness that are in you?

So let’s imagine for a second that there was a painting on the wall of this studio, and you and I were looking at it together. We might look at that painting. It might be, let’s say, a religious icon or something. And you and I would bring to the experience of looking at it what we have. We would notice colors. We would think about other images like it we might have seen. We would think about the other images that might not be here, but that could be or the symbolic things that are in it.

And as we experience that kind of web of things that are in the image, we’d really be sort of seeing a long web of connectedness that’s in ourselves. And so, for Stiegler, attention is waiting on the disclosure of those long webs of connectedness, which are a mirroring of our own infinitude in the world. Attention, infinite waiting. Attention, triggering. Sharp contrast.

And let me try to bring in a third thing that I think is kind of exquisitely poised over and outside of that contestation between those two. In the early 20th century novel “Wings of the Dove,” the American novelist Henry James describes a really beautiful and intense scene in which a very, very ill woman, terminally ill woman, has a fleeting encounter with the doctor she desperately needs. She believes this doctor kind of knows what she needs to survive. She hopes that this doctor can kind of get her past her anguish.

The doctor’s very busy, and James depicts the scene where the two of them sit for a moment. And he describes the doctor as placing on the table between them a clear, clean crystal cup, empty of attention, an empty crystal cup of attention that the doctor places on the table between them. And that sort of figuration of attention as a kind of an empty cup that we place between ourselves and the object of our attention is like, I think it exquisitely invokes that idea of imminence, that kind of negative capability.

Anything’s possible here, the gesture of generosity. It has a little bit of that sense of waiting, but it also has a sense of a solicitation. Something needs to happen. So it includes elements of that catalytic, and it includes elements of that kind of mirroring, waiting image. And so, when I have to talk about what I think attention is, I’ll often use that image. Like, what’s attention? Attention is that kind of empty cup we can place between ourselves and the things we care about in the world and see what happens.

You’ve talked about how attention is — or at least the way we think about it now, is a modern construct. Can you talk a bit about that?

Let me give you one of the most amazing arguments about attention that’s ever been made by anybody, by my distinguished colleague Jonathan Crary. Jonathan Crary is an art historian at Columbia University. In a book called “Suspensions of Perception,” published around 2000, he made a super challenging argument about where that language of attention comes from and why, in the late 19th century, the same time that the scientists start studying it in laboratories, everybody starts getting worried about it and talking about it in a very particular way.

Crary argues that you don’t see a lot of discussions about attention in the 1780s, 1790s, even 1820. It’s not a thing. He says that worry about attention comes into being across the second half of the 19th century in a very particular way because of a very specific set of transformations in the experience of personhood. Imagine white guys in wigs with knickers on.

Those guys thought of themselves as a little bit like a camera obscura, right? Those boxes that have a little pinhole in them, like a forerunner of the camera. And the mind is like that box. There’s a world out there. There’s a world in here. There’s a nice mapping function between those two worlds. And therefore I, as a propertied white male subject, am good in the world because the world is out there and in me, in a relatively unproblematic way.

Crary argues, I think correctly, that that way of conceptualizing the human, the classical model of human subjectivity, implodes across the second half of the 19th century. What kills it? What does it end? We discover that, in fact, everybody doesn’t have the same picture inside themselves as what’s out there in the world, that we’re these oozy things made of meat, you know? And that actually, our eyes have blind spots. And suddenly the sort of physiological complexity of sensation makes a mincemeat of the classical model.

So then where are you in this kind of blooming, buzzing confusion of modernity now that you’re like an opaque, thick meat creature, instead of this nice camera obscura creature? Well, Crary argues that attention is born in that moment as a way of saying, again, that I hold together as one being, as I confront or encounter the world. Where are you? You are where your attention is.

Your will maybe, that’s that idea that somehow will has something to do with it. That for William James, attention and will were almost inextricable, right? That free will itself, if it existed, its locus was the moment in which I could choose to give my attention here versus there. And while everybody recognized that there was involuntary attention, there was this deep sense that attention was born in the late 19th century as a new language for talking about the coherence of the human subject.

Let me offer two responses that come to mind, and starting here. So obviously, he knows the discourse around attention much better than I ever will. But the first thing that I know where there was a lot of discussion and conversation about attention, going far, far, far back before the 19th century, is within religion.

So in Christianity, you have deep attention to attention among different kinds of monks and monastics. Buddhism has that. There are traditions in Judaism around that. I’m sure there’s much more in other religions that I know less well. Prayer is an attentional question. Meditation is a technology of attention as it gets talked about now. But you can frame it in much more spiritual ways than that. So what should that make us think that there was so much more, perhaps, attention to attention within the monastic religious traditions?

It’s a great question again, and I share your interest in those forms of attention. I do want to say that while it is certainly true that people have been concerned about how to hold before their minds and their senses objects since forever, and that religious spaces have been central zones for that sort of combat of the senses and the will, if one actually digs in on that stuff, the language often isn’t sort of the language we would use.

Contemplation, for instance, was a central preoccupation of monks.

But if you had brought them the kinds of questions that are getting asked by the early 20th century concerning that sort of stimulus response phenomenon or even the ways that William James will talk about attention, that would have been unrecognizable to them. That said, much of my own interest in attention actually comes out of my own meditational life as well. I care deeply about the spiritual traditions that inform our resources, as we begin to think about what to do now.

And there are some 20th century thinkers who have commented in really profound ways on the relationship between prayer and the thing we are now worried about when we talk about attention. The great French mystic Simone Weil comes to mind.

So Simone Weil, who skirted up to the edge of Christianity in different ways, but never crossed over, was a political activist, a labor activist, and ultimately, a kind of social justice martyr across the era of the Second World War, wrote passionately that pure, unmixed attention is prayer.

So for her, if you like apophatic attention, attention that won’t have an easy object or end or purpose. When I say apophatic, I invoke the tradition of negative theology, right? Two theological traditions. One where you try to get at God directly, one where you say, look, God is so beyond us. We’re not going to get to God. We’re finite creatures. God is infinite.

Our best chance to get anything like the God space is to enumerate everything that’s not God to get at God via the via negativa, the negative way. So we will enumerate the cloud of unknowing, rather than getting all puffed up with ourselves that we’re having a conversation with God.

I would argue that Simon Weil’s account of attention as a sort of radical, pure emptying of one’s self, an openness to immanence, is apophatic. It’s an attention that isn’t triggerable. It won’t target. You can’t bring it out in stimulus and response experimentations because it waits in a kind of ecstatic and infinite openness for that which it knows not.

So that’s the other question that comes up for me. There is an argument that what we are saying about attention now is just another moral panic of the kind we’ve been having since the early 19th century, that people were complaining about how we were losing our attention then. Trains were too fast, life was too fast. Everybody’s reading newspapers.

And it’s the same arguments, and yet, it’s all been fine. We worried about this with the advent of radio, with the advent of television. It just comes up and up and up and up. And then we just kind of move on to the next thing, and we worry about it again. And when people think about the attentional golden age, to the extent they imagine it, they don’t mean the 15 century. They mean right before whatever the thing they’re worried about now is, right?

Blogging was great. Social media was too far. Or if blogging was too much, newspapers were great, but digital news is too far. How do you think about that concern that you and me, we are aging and just part of a perennial moral panic?

I’m sympathetic to that critique of all this. By the same token, people have been deeply right, again and again, that things were changing. And things have changed in ways that were catastrophic, in addition to changing in ways that have been transformative and good. And some measure of what we need out of historical consciousness is the kind of critical discernment to make those judgments.

So, was there a moral panic about advertising in the early 20th century? There sure was. Why? Because people started experimenting with projecting advertisements using very bright lights, arc lamps on the underside of clouds. And everyone was like, this is horrible. I don’t want to read soap ads like on the night sky. And then people began to think it would be amazing to have amplified screaming ads floating in the air over cities so that you would have continuous barrages of sound advertisements in space. Also, horrible.

New technologies do really make possible new forms of human exploitation. This is real. The factory system certainly improved life in lots of ways. It made available much less expensive textiles, for instance. But you’d have to be out of your mind not to recognize that the aggregation of labor in the satanic mills of Lancashire created monstrous new labor conditions, against which people had to gather together and mount resistance.

I would argue that we are in a moment now in which this human fracking and the essentially unregulated commodification of this precious stuff out of which we make ourselves the instrument of our being, this is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this. And we need to mount new forms of resistance.

We don’t know yet what the forms of resistance will be, just like those early resistors in the factory system didn’t yet understand the way that labor politics and trade unionism would emerge as meaningful technologies of collective action. We don’t yet know what forms of resistance are going to emerge. That is what we need, is like all hands on deck for a kind of attention activism that raises our awareness. And this work is happening in lots of different places already. And we need to see what happens with it in the years ahead.

Maybe this is a digression, maybe it’s not, because you’re a historian who has dealt with this question, I think, a bunch. I’m fascinated by the way we think about past moral panics. Call them moral panics, right? The very term assumes just a hysteria that then went away. Often, when I go back and I read critics of a previous technological moment, it’s true on one level that, obviously, the world did not come to an end. We’re sitting here talking. And it is also often true that they were right.

You go back and read Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” and the thing he is predicting roughly will eventually happen is that we will think everything must be entertainment. And so even things that should not be entertainment will become driven by and assessed on the values of entertainment. And it is just like a direct line to Donald Trump. And you could say, oh, we had a previous moral panic about television, or you could say, all these people were right. The world didn’t end, but a lot of bad things actually did happen.

I think about this with advertising. Mid-century, there is a tremendous amount of critique and interest in the rise of advertising. You can read “The Affluent Society” by John Kenneth Galbraith, and he’s very interested in this question. And my sense is, among economists and others, that’s looked back on as a little bit embarrassing, right? Like, look, there’s advertising, and it’s fine.

And I don’t know. I’m actually amazed. I moved to New York about a year ago. I’m amazed at how much advertising is permitted on the subway. Public space, right? The subway I would go into for a long time, it had a grayscale image advertising “The Exorcist” reboot — horrifying image, like two girls, black [INAUDIBLE] dripping from their mouth. I mean, just grotesque. Every morning, I would see it.

And it seems a little bit dystopic. This is public space. Why am I being — why every morning, when I bring my five-year-old onto the subways, he’s seeing an ad for a horror movie? But we’ve just gotten used to it.

I’m curious how you think about this discourse, this sense that the things we worried about in the past, we were obviously wrong to worry about. And as such, worrying about things in the present is probably going to be wrong, too. Because eventually, we’ll simply make our peace with it, and the world will move on. And if it does that, then, clearly, it was fine.

Yeah. Where even to begin? Oh, my heavens. I mean, those who have worried that things were getting worse have been essential to our being clear-eyed about our condition again and again. The process by which money value has displaced other languages of value, big picture, that’s one of the enormous secular trends one can discern over the last 150, 200 years. And I would say many of the things you just invoked are, in effect, explicable out of that dynamic.

Now, I don’t want to sound reactionary when I say that, and I also don’t wish to kind of invoke some fantasy utopia of the past, but we are more severed from each other now than at any time in human history, even as we have this kind of ersatz experience of our being aggregated in new and powerful ways.

We’ve seen dynamics that simultaneously severed us from each other and created new aggregations, for instance, the rise of nationalism across the 19th century, which was a kind of harrowing ideology that created new forms of collective identity and displaced experiences of intimacy at the same time with monstrous consequences. So it’s totally reasonable, I believe, to be extremely uneasy about the dynamics that we’re seeing.

One thing that has, again, bothered me about a lot of the discourse on attention is, I think, because we don’t have a good definition of it itself, we don’t, I think, think about it very clearly. We know what we often don’t want. A lot of us don’t want the feeling, the fractured, irritated, outraged feeling we have on social media or online. We don’t like learning and noticing in ourselves that the amount of time we spend on any single task on the computer has dropped and dropped and dropped.

A lot of us have this experience of fracture. So we know what we don’t want — this. I don’t think we have a very good, positive vision. How do you think about the creation of a positive vision of attention, given the extraordinary diversity of human experience and wants?

Yeah, it’s a very hard question. In a sense, you’re asking both a question about authority and also asking a question about prescription. Are we going to prescribe for people this versus that, and who will prescribe? I think of the extraordinary definition of education that Gayatri Spivak offers, which is the non-coercive rearranging of desire. What’s education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

And that rings for you?

I have to say it does.

That’s not how my education felt to me.

Well, I don’t think a lot of our educations work that way. So I would say that that’s a richly humanistic and, at the same time, critical account of education. It’s not especially an account of education that conduces to making optimized workers in the labor force.

But let’s just sort of unpack it for a second. We organize our lives around desire in some basic sense. You say, we just tell people that they shouldn’t want, enjoy, receive that little dopamine hit, feel good when they’re scrolling through TikTok. Well, OK. Our desires can go lots of different places. It’s also possible for us to put our desires in places that ultimately lead to our being unhappy and lonely, not flourishing.

The question of how to organize our desires, how to know what it is we want that is what we really want, or what, in wanting, most dignifies and extends our experience of being, as opposed to, again, severing and impoverishing us. That’s the hard work of education. And people have to work that stuff out for themselves, but also, they have to work that stuff out with other people.

That’s, in a sense, why the humanistic tradition brings with it tradition, stuff, the kind of best that’s been thought and said — texts, objects. Here, here, look at this. It’s not, “look at this, I’m going to force you.” It’s, “I want you non-coercively to discover that in being with this in these ways, something good will happen.”

Yeah, let me hold on to this idea of non-coercion. So first, for me, education was coercive. I did not want to spend eight hours a day sitting in these small classrooms being lectured at. Just didn’t. I had to — which I don’t think is a bad thing. I am not really one of these people who thinks that childhood should be up to the whims of the child. I don’t think I would have made good decisions as a kid. I’m not sure the decisions made for me were great decisions either — but nevertheless.

And something that has been on my mind has been how bad, I think, parents, at least of certain classes right now, have gotten at coercion. And it worries me because my kids are young. So it’s kind of easy right now, but I know it’s going to get harder. And I see all these parents who know that they don’t think their kids should have a smartphone when they’re 11. And they fall because, eh, the other kids do.

And I see in this debate that we’re having right now about smartphones and kids, what I would describe as a real discomfort with how to be paternalistic when paternalism is actually needed. So Jon Haidt writes his book, “The Anxious Generation.” Part of the book’s thesis is that smartphones and social media have kicked off a mental health crisis in our children. Then there’s a huge back and forth on these exact studies.

And one thing I really noticed in this whole debate, where I think the research is very complicated and you can fairly come to a view on either end of it, is that if you convinced me that my kids scroll on their phones for four hours a day, had no outcome on their mental health at all — it did not make them more anxious — it did not make them more depressed — it would change my view on this not at all. I just think, as a way of living a good life, you shouldn’t be staring at your phone for four hours a day.

And yet, I also realize the language of society right now and parenting doesn’t have that much room for that. And I think we have a lot of trouble talking about just what we think a good life would be. Not a life that leads to a good job, not a life that leads to a high income, but just the idea, which I think we were more comfortable talking in terms of at other points in history, that it is better to read books than to not read books, no matter if you can measure that on somebody’s income statement or not.

And so I wonder not just about the non-coercive rearranging of desire, but I also wonder about — I mean, I don’t love calling it the coercive rearranging of desire, but the ability to talk about what we think we should desire or socially approve of, and then particularly for younger kids, for whom their attentional resources are being formed, actually insist upon that.

So I want to ask you back a question in response to that, which is, just, where do you anchor your intuition that it is, say, better to read a book than it is to scroll on TikTok for four hours?

If I’m being honest as a parent, right — and I’m not saying I would legislate this — I anchor it in my own experience of attention. I think books are remarkable and specific in their ability to simultaneously allow for a deep immersion in somebody else, right? Another human being’s story or thoughts or mind, and also create a lot of space for your own mind wandering. And I will say — and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to invite you on the show. We’ll talk about the School of Attention that you’re part of in a bit. I will say that my biggest concern and the concern that nobody really has an answer to for me, because I do want to send my kids to public school, is that I care less about how they are taught subjects than how they are taught attention, what kind of attention they’re able to bring to the things they will want to know. But again, the thing that worries me is that I see so little discourse like that.

I’m enormously moved by what you’re saying. The dynamics that you’re describing are not unfolding in empty space. They’re unfolding in relation to a basically unbridled dynamic of financial optimization. Like, we just can’t leave capitalism out of this. The system in which we operate is centrally driven by return on investment, not by human flourishing.

And there may be no other way to organize large, modern, complex societies. But we would be insane not continuously to hold before us the essential adversary here. The corporations are not on our sides. And the fact that a major split of our contemporary economy has figured out how to monetize not just our labor, but our actual ability to give ourselves to what we care about, is extremely bad for our ability to continue to be non-inhuman beings.

I think I’m getting at something similar when I talk about my discomfort with how hard we find it to criticize choice. People mean a lot of things when they talk about neoliberalism, and I don’t love the term, one, because I think it annoys people and shuts them down. But the other is because it’s imprecise. But the thing I mean, when I talk about neoliberalism and the neoliberal age, is a period in which the logic of markets became the logic.

Absolutely.

And I think it has become very difficult to think outside of market logic. And when I read older texts, I see a lot more discussion of the good of virtues of — and a lot of it is very religiously inflected, to be fair. I mean, religion was an alternative structure of logic of meaning that was in contestation with economic ways of thinking about that. I think as religion has weakened not only as an organized force, but as a kind of conceptual way of looking at the world, capitalism market logic has taken over a lot of that space. And the market does not have our interests at heart.

You invoke religion as one of the traditions on which one has been able to draw for a discourse of value that would not reduce to money value. I would invoke to other kinds of institutions that have been really important. There’s the space of education. I mean, I basically believe that a lot of what we do in the humanities is a training of attention.

And partially, that’s like why we have to hold on to and protect spaces for humanistic work in our education, because a lot of the other stuff can be instrumentalized. It’s part of the reason it’s getting increasingly exterminated from universities because you can’t monetize it. And but I say all of that just because interpretation or meaning is so inextricable from the labor of attention.

And there’s a third, which I also think is interesting to consider, which is spaces of art, music, aesthetics. I mean, artists have always made fun of the bourgeois collector who showed up with a giant bag of money and said, show me the most expensive thing, and I’ll take it. And the people in the know and the space of the arts would snicker and say, how callow that he walked out with that. That’s not the good stuff.

So each of those spaces, spaces of religion and institutions of education, study, teaching, and learning, and then museums and spaces of artistic production, symphonies, music, each of those institutions has meaningful traditions of non-instrumentalizable attention.

Is attention the category of the thing we want or a subcategory of the thing that we want? So sometimes I wonder if attention is a word like health. If I told you health is important, you’d nod your head. You’re nodding your head, in fact, right now. If I said, I’m really trying to work on my health, on the one hand, you would get what I meant by that. On some level, I don’t want to die soon and young for a preventable reason. But I also wouldn’t really tell you anything. There’s so many subcategories to health, right? You go to doctors for different parts of the body. And there’s mental health and fitness and different kinds of fitness and cardiovascular and strength. And sometimes when we talk about attention, it feels to me like we are talking about a thing like health, the entire basket of different forms of awareness and experience we use when we are moving through the world.

And sometimes it feels like we are talking about something very specific, right? Cardiovascular fitness, not health, right? And then alongside that, there are all these other things you might want to cultivate and be concerned about. Which one is it for you?

I think you put your finger exactly on that duplex nature of our discourse around attention. Both those notions are in the language of attention that we use. And I would argue that what’s important now is that we have the richest conversation about attention to surface it as our collective concern in the way that this podcast and all the podcasts you’ve done on this and the wide range of authors, like Jenny Odell and James Williams and Tim Wu, all these folks who’ve written on this.

We need more of all of that because — and here’s where your language of health is exactly right — what we need is a kind of almost revolutionary rising of our awareness around the importance of this stuff. I’m old enough to remember a period back when nobody went running. James F. Fixx, right? He wrote the book on running in — what was it — ‘77. Before that, regular people didn’t go jogging. They didn’t go running. People who ran were people who were sort of athletes or people in school because they were doing collective sports.

Also, there weren’t gyms that regular people went to. Right? There were places like Gold’s Gym, where you could go if you were a powerlifter or a boxer. I’m talking 1974 or ‘75. The whole idea that ordinary people would concern themselves with their fitness is something that’s emerged over the last 40 years. It’s staggering to consider the scale of the collective awareness of our physical well-being. Now, does that mean that health itself is a new idea? No, people have been worried about their health since forever. But the specific activation of fitness, that’s a relatively new thing, and it’s really changed in our lifetimes. And I’m proposing to you that that’s going to happen again. Over the next 40 years, a collective recognition that our wellness in our attentional lives, our hygiene and health and our attention, is going to be constitutive of our experience of being. This is what’s going to happen. It’s going to reshape education, which, as you’ve signaled, needs to be for and about attention. That’s what it needs to teach. And it’s going to transform our other ways of being together.

So you’re trying to do some of this. You have, along with others, this School of Attention. What are you trying to teach?

Yeah, I love this stuff. I mean, we think of the school as a little bit Black Mountain College, creative, artistic collaboration; a little bit like something like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, continuing education for people who want to read together and think and be together in person in a place; and then a little bit like the kind of radical labor schools of the teens and ‘20s, like the schools created by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which were more like activist projects to promote a certain kind of politics.

So that’s kind of the triangle in which we place the school. The school does not promote some single programmatic theory of attention. On the contrary, we’re interested in all the different traditions that can inform how we take attention forward. We had a senior Zen student do a course on Zen meditation as an intentional form. A class on cinematography as a medium in which attention is choreographed cinematically. A class on perfume where smell as a sensory modality is centered as a sort of attentional form.

We run workshops — and this is separate from the classes. We do free workshops. And the workshops are sort of opportunities to actually do some intentional stuff together, exercises in which people will, for instance, listen four times to the same four-minute piece of music under, again, different sort of mental orientations, but collectively, then take some notes and talk out what happened as they sort of used their attention.

And possibly the coolest thing we do at the school are these things called sidewalk studies, in which between 5 and 10 people will get together, usually a bar or a cafe, and they’ll read a carefully selected paragraph closely together and talk about it seminar style, having a drink. That paragraph is on a card. When you flip the card over, there’s a thing to do together, like a street action, like a kind of situationist style activity.

So an example would be like a great Audre Lorde passage on food in the city. The action is going into a bodega and actually examining the bodega for where surveillance is happening, where nourishment is happening, and then moving to the second bar and talking through what it was like to be in the space of the bodega with the Audre Lorde passage in our heads together.

And there are dozens and dozens of these exercises that are continuously being invented by folks in the school and doing them together. They do it because it’s a way of being together and practicing attention together to generate forms of solidarity.

I’m interested in that idea of practicing attention together. With my kids, when I think about this, one of the things that I wonder is when I ask, what do I mean by I want them taught attention? Some part of it is just I want them to have familiarity, a visceral, somatic familiarity with what different kinds of attention feel like.

I’m not sure I had that for a very long time. I’d, of course, experienced many kinds of attention, but it’s only later in life I become more mindful of what they feel like. And that’s helped me diminish the role of some in my life. The reason I’m not on Twitter or X anymore is that I don’t like the feeling of the attention it furnishes. I don’t like how I feel when I leave it. The reason I’ve sort of moved back to paper books is I do like the feeling of the attention. I notice that it is healthier for me. It sounds to me a little bit like something you all are trying to do is just creating contexts in which you experience different kinds of attention, so you have that internal map you can work with.

Absolutely. It’s a do by doing kind of thing. You actually have to come together with other people and surface the question of attention and then experience what giving one’s attention with others can do to be reminded of how precious that feature of our being is and discover what can be returned from the world to themselves out of opening themselves to it intentionally.

So I thought a good place to end here would be to do the deep listening activity, or at least a truncated version of it that you described earlier. So how do you lead people through this?

OK, so this would be an example of one of the exercises we might do at one of the attention labs at the Strother School. And we always like to make clear that we borrow from lots of different traditions. So this is very much like the kinds of exercises that the wonderful sound artist genius, Pauline Oliveros, would use in her practice.

It’s not exactly like her stuff, but we always kind of talk a bit about Pauline Oliveros, and we set this one up. And there are other sound artists who inform the kind of stuff we care about, Annea Lockwood and others. The exercise is going to have four phases. I understand that you’ve got a sort of sound piece queued up.

We’ve got it.

OK we’re going to actually play it four times. So your listeners have to be ready. You’re going to hear that piece of music, which is about how many minutes would you say?

I think we’ve cut it to 30 seconds or so.

OK, so it’s 30 seconds. We normally do this for a little longer, but all right. So wherever you are, get ready. You’re going to hear this 30-second sound piece four times. And I’m going to give you the mood under which you’ll attend to it. First, just listen. OK? First, listen.

Second listen, recall. What have you heard before?

Third listen, discover. What do you hear for the first time?

And four, finally, don’t listen. What do you find when you don’t listen?

So let’s talk back and forth. An observation about each of the phases. What happened in the first phase for you, Ezra?

The striking thing about listening to it the first time was the way my body’s response kept changing. So initially, it’s like you got these birds. It seems like it’s going to be a kind of nice ambient piece of music.

And then just like the intense, escalating tension, somewhat mounting dread, the noise goes up. The number of sounds happening simultaneously, it feels like it goes up. The volume goes up. So by the end, you’ve begun — or for me, I began as, oh, a nice — like, Jesus Christ, why did my producers choose this piece of music? So, yeah, it was a little bit — the first time, I was just on the ride of the bodily response to it.

For me, in the first attempt through, I was acutely attuned to 1,000 questions sort of pulling me in all directions. Because I’m accustomed to doing these kinds of things over a long time, so longer, more immersive, more people, so a lot of anxiety as to whether this kind of thing can work in this setting. So the truth is, I became aware about midway through that I was effectively not listening to the thing at all on the first time through, trying, but trying, but failing for me on the first one. We go to the second listen where we were trying to hear something that we’d heard before, recall.

The second one I was struck by — so I remembered the birds, right? I noticed they go on a little bit longer than I thought. And the second, I was a little braced because I remembered the feeling I had on the first. I was like, oh, as this keeps going, you feel worse. And so the remembrance was of what was coming in the way that then made me surprised by what was there in the moment.

Super interesting. This is so embarrassing, but I heard the birds for the first time in the second phase. [LAUGHS]

It’s not remembering.

That’s not. So it was a double catastrophe because I was like, how the heck did I not hear the birds in the first phase? My listening was so bad in phase one and two. Wait a second, I’m not supposed to discover new things until phase three.

So I had phase catastrophic disaster and felt bad about myself, but then sort of rounded on that and became aware of that inexorable march time that comes in and the harrowing fatalism that one associates with that musical mode. And so I had gotten to that in the first listen and was able to be like, OK, OK, I’m remembering that. I’m remembering that. Third listen, were you able to discover anything new?

Yeah, I was more attentive to the birds, so I was sort of tracking them. I realized they disappear. The whole piece, then, on the third, the thing I noticed was it feels like you’re clear cutting a forest, right? That felt to me like what that piece of music was, right? You were going through the forest. It’s initially fairly untouched. And then with each rising, I mean, the birds eventually falling silent, that tick, tick, tick, tick. When you talk about the fatalism of it, I mean, this felt like a piece of music that was about the clear cutting of an ecosystem.

Yeah, and I love — discovery for me involved a loop into how this piece came to be. I heard a twang that felt guitar-like, but I’m almost certain that the music was composed electronically. So I had a little moment of your engineer or your creatives, whoever’s back there making this, and were they at a machine? What kind of machine? What kinds of clips or samples were they drawing on?

So my kind of discovery, in a sense, was the sources and being recalled to the question of the sources of these sounds, these acoustic experiences. Final phase, four, you tried not to listen, Ezra. What happened?

It was more comfortable.

That body response to that kind of mounting dread, that anxiety, just was muted. So it was more like the way I listen to music when I work, where my attention is not on the music, and the music is providing a mood and an energy. Right? The music is a kind of stimulant.

What did you —

I’m not deeply immersed in it.

What did you do with the rest of you to not listen? Because, of course, our ears are funny. You can’t close your ears. So the stuff’s going to keep coming in. It’s not like our eyes. We’re —

Well, I moved to the eyes.

More of my attention was on what I was seeing.

Yeah, I did exactly the same thing. Did you close your eyes in the first three phases? Did you keep them open as you were listening? You did?

Kept them open on all.

That’s interesting. I closed them, but I opened my eyes on the final phase and had a little taste. It was quick, but a little taste of that foretaste of the ecstasy of trying to awaken my visual field, and brighten it such that it would displace my acoustic experience.

So I kind of had hyper vision for a second in an effort to blast out of my ears the acoustic experience by overwhelming it with the other sensory modality. And that was a little tremor of the good stuff where you can sort of feel an activation of what you can do with your attention as an aspect of being. I must say I enjoyed that.

So what’s the point of all that for you? If that is a successful lesson when you do it, what are you hoping people will have experienced? What is the meta lesson of that lesson, right? It’s not just what you heard in the music. What did we just do?

Yeah. I want to just admit that I’m not super sure, and that kind of uncertainty is part of it. And what I can assure you is that when seven or eight people get together in Brooklyn and do something like this for half hour or 45 minutes, we all come out of it feeling so good.

It just feels so right to be with ourselves and what our minds and senses can do and with other people in relation to what’s in the world this way. And I think that at this moment, we need to carve out more spaces for these kinds of activated experiences within our teaching and learning environments.

Let me end on this. If you’re somebody who’s not near the Brooklyn Strother School of Radical Attention, but are somebody who kind of senses something is wrong with your attention, wrong the intentional world that you inhabit, and you want it to be better for you, you want to find a space of what will feel like attentional health, where do you start?

Yeah, it’s a great question. And for my answer, I’m going to read one of the “12 Theses on Attention” written by The Friends. Thesis 9 of the 12 theses reads, “Sanctuaries for true attention already exist. They are among us now, but they’re endangered. And many are in hiding, operating in self-sustaining, inclusive, generous, and fugitive forms. These sanctuaries can be found, but it takes an effort of attention to find them. And this seeking is also attention’s effort to heal itself.”

So my answer is, find a sanctuary. It’s there. And your listeners out there, they all have their different sweet spots where they are able to protect themselves from the frackers. It might be gardening. It might be that they actually can weld. And when they’ve got their visor down and they’re in the puddle of the hot metal, that’s when everything is zoned out. They may be knitting, and they may be doing a Zumba class.

I don’t know what it is they’re doing that’s near you and what you would find and make possible, but find your people. And out of finding your people and with a measure of intentionality, insisting upon the sanctuary where you are resistant to being fracked, attention can begin to heal. And that seeking out of the sanctuary space is itself already part of the healing.

So then always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

Oh, there are so many great books. And all we need to do is protect the ability to read them, and we’ll be good. Well, let’s start with one that I think is a deep and challenging and important book in this kind of attention space. And it’s by my esteemed colleague Natasha Dow Schüll down at N.Y.U. It’s called “Addiction by Design.”

Natasha Dow Schüll is a science and technology studies scholar, an anthropologist by training, and she did an extraordinary book on video poker machines, gambling machines in Vegas. It’s a kind of a pre-smartphone book about the engineering of addiction by the folks who designed those gambling machines and the environments in which they sit.

And if you want to have a kind of harrowing inwardness with the sophisticated, dark pattern technologies that can be achieved, even in the most primitive technologies, those machines are not fancy in important ways, right? They are a kind of 19th century printing press to a modern, full-color laser printer in relation to what we have now in our pockets. But already to see how sophisticated the design of those systems were to suck people in and hold them, it’s amazing. Natasha Dow Schüll, “Addiction by Design.”

A second book that I love and that also comes out of my field and that I think is a deep and hard but beautiful and important book for thinking about the history of science would be the book “Objectivity” by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston, both of whom are really great historians of science. That book is a history of something that seems impossible to historicize. I mean, objectivity doesn’t have a history. Objectivity is just being objective. That’s like transhistorical.

And they do an extraordinary and counterintuitive job of showing how radically historical our conceptualization of objectivity itself is, how entangled it is with shifting ideas of subjectivity, for instance, or the way that it plays off of the emergence of mechanical technologies for making inscriptions. So “Objectivity” by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston.

And then I guess my wild card book would just be a book I love and a book about the imagination, belief, dreams, and about America. It’s by Herman Melville, of course, the author of “Moby Dick,” a book I also love.

But I’m going to invoke his much stranger book, “The Confidence-Man,” which is a book about how belief happens and who the people are who can make us believe and about the sort of entanglement of hope and belief. It’s very much a book about this strange country that I love and believe in, and that has to make us all also very uncomfortable a lot of the time. Herman Melville’s “The Confidence-Man.”

D. Graham Burnett, thank you very much.

Total pleasure. Thanks.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith. Original music by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

The steady dings of notifications. The 40 tabs that greet you when you open your computer in the morning. The hundreds of unread emails, most of them spam, with subject lines pleading or screaming for you to click. Our attention is under assault these days, and most of us are familiar with the feeling that gives us — fractured, irritated, overwhelmed.

D. Graham Burnett calls the attention economy an example of “human fracking”: With our attention in shorter and shorter supply, companies are going to even greater lengths to extract this precious resource from us. And he argues that it’s now reached a point that calls for a kind of revolution. “This is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this,” he tells me. “And we need to mount new forms of resistance.”

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app , Apple , Spotify , Amazon Music , YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts .]

Burnett is a professor of the history of science at Princeton University and is working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. He’s also a co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention , which is a kind of grass roots, artistic effort to create a curriculum for studying attention.

In this conversation, we talk about how the 20th-century study of attention laid the groundwork for today’s attention economy, the connection between changing ideas of attention and changing ideas of the self, how we even define attention (this episode is worth listening to for Burnett’s collection of beautiful metaphors alone), whether the concern over our shrinking attention spans is simply a moral panic, what it means to teach attention and more.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app , Apple , Spotify , Google or wherever you get your podcasts . View a list of book recommendations from our guests here .

(A full transcript of this episode is available here .)

A portrait of a man (D. Graham Burnett) wearing glasses, a beard and an earring.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith. Original music by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

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What could be a thesis statement for "The Boat" by Alistair MacLeod
A thesis statement about Alistair MacLeod 's "The Boat" would probably be concerned with the story's most important elements, such as characters and themes. Each reader will approach the ...
What is a possible thesis statement for "The Open Boat" by Stephen
Crane's "Open Boat" has defied categorization. For instance, some critics feel it is a Naturalistic story in the point of view that an unsympathetic nature allows the men to be at the whim of the ...
"The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane: A Critical Analysis
Questions and Thesis Statements about "The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane. What is the role of nature in "The Open Boat"? Thesis statement: In "The Open Boat," nature is portrayed as an indifferent and powerful force that shapes the lives of the characters, highlighting the limitations of human agency and the inevitability of mortality.
The Open Boat Critical Essays
PDF Cite Share. "The Open Boat" is based on Stephen Crane's own experience of a shipwreck in 1897. Crane had been working as a war correspondent when he sailed for Cuba on the ship Commodore ...
Humans vs. Nature Theme in The Open Boat
Humans vs. Nature Theme Analysis. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Open Boat, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. "The Open Boat" primarily centers on the dynamic between humankind and nature. Humankind is represented by the four men in the boat: the correspondent, the captain, the cook, and the ...
How to Write a Thesis Statement
Placement of the thesis statement. Step 1: Start with a question. Step 2: Write your initial answer. Step 3: Develop your answer. Step 4: Refine your thesis statement. Types of thesis statements. Other interesting articles. Frequently asked questions about thesis statements.
PDF Thesis Statements
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 ...
Literary Naturalism: "The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane Essay
Setting "The Open Boat" amidst the stormy sea, Crane depicts the objectivity of Nature, exactly following the Naturalistic interpretation of it as an indifferent and impartial matter: "This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the ...
"The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane
Introduction. A short story by Stephen Crane called "The Open Boat" follows four men on a journey through the sea in an attempt to find help. The central characters, the correspondent, the captain, the oiler, and the cook, are all survivors of a shipwreck which left them stranded in the water in a small and flimsy dinghy.
Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat"
In the story, the author describes four men who were shipwrecked and had to compete with the force of nature to reach the shore. Even though the work is typically categorized as an example of naturalistic fiction, some critics claim that The Open Boat is a rather existentialist fiction (Sorrentino, 2006).The relationship between nature and man is a central theme in the story that reveals Crane ...
How to Write a Strong Thesis Statement: 4 Steps + Examples
Step 4: Revise and refine your thesis statement before you start writing. Read through your thesis statement several times before you begin to compose your full essay. You need to make sure the statement is ironclad, since it is the foundation of the entire paper. Edit it or have a peer review it for you to make sure everything makes sense and ...
Thesis Statements
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.
Crafting a Powerful Thesis Statement for a Movie Review: Examples and
A thesis statement in a movie review presents the main argument or opinion that you will be discussing and supporting throughout your review. IT typically appears near the end of your introduction and should be clear, concise, and thought-provoking. The thesis statement should provide an overall evaluation or interpretation of the movie ...
Developing 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 ...
Developing A Thesis
Keep your thesis prominent in your introduction. A good, standard place for your thesis statement is at the end of an introductory paragraph, especially in shorter (5-15 page) essays. Readers are used to finding theses there, so they automatically pay more attention when they read the last sentence of your introduction.
Naturalism The Open Boat By Stephen Crane Thesis
Naturalism The Open Boat by Stephen Crane is a novel that revolves more around the theme of Naturalism. This story revolves around four men hoping to reach a destination and trying to survive while doing so. Many think this is an examination of the man's relationship with the universe and each other as well. The men act and behave according to ...
Academic Guides: Writing a Paper: Thesis Statements
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.
"The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane Free Essay Example
Categories: Free Essays. Download. Essay, Pages 12 (2755 words) Views. 1603. In "The Open Boat" Stephen Crane uses the sea and four men adrift in a dinghy as a framework for communicating his ideas about life. The story, in my opinion, is a metaphor for life. The four men are helpless against the indifferent, yet overwhelming forces of nature.
Naturalism in "The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane
One of the major naturalist writers of 19 th century America is Stephen Crane. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was strongly influenced by naturalism, and his writings show a great respect for environment as controlling force. Stephen Crane's The Open Boat revolves around four shipwrecked men: the captain, the cook, the correspondent, and the oiler.
Ship of Theseus
The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a thought experiment and paradox about whether an object is the same object after having had all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other.. In Greek mythology, Theseus, mythical king and founder of the city Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then ...
Welcome to the Purdue Online Writing Lab
Learn how to write effectively for academic, professional, and personal purposes at the Purdue Online Writing Lab, a free resource for writers of all levels.
The Process for Developing Thesis Statements for History : Home
The thesis statement can be up to three to four sentences and is expected to be at the end or your introduction. The Finish: Your working thesis stays with the writing project until you revise it for the VERY last time - right before submitting your whole paper. You want to make sure that is closely reflects your conclusion, which was written ...
Coral Gables police investigate 'incident' between ...
Hudak's statement did not name the specific individuals involved. However, sources familiar with the matter said the incident in question took place between Lago and Rojas.
Opinion
Thesis 9 of the 12 theses reads, "Sanctuaries for true attention already exist. They are among us now, but they're endangered. And many are in hiding, operating in self-sustaining, inclusive ...

“The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane: A Critical Analysis

Introduction: “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Main Events in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Literary Devices in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Characterization in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Major Themes in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Additional Notes:

Writing Style in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Literary Theories and Interpretation of “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Short Questions and Answers about “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Literary Works Similar to “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Suggested Readings: “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Scholarly Journal Article

Further Research Resources

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How to Write a Strong Thesis Statement: 4 Steps + Examples

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Crafting a Powerful Thesis Statement for a Movie Review: Examples and Tips

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What is a Thesis Statement in a Movie Review?

Examples of Powerful Thesis Statements

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2. Should I mention the title of the movie in my thesis statement?

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What is a thesis statement?

Identify a topic

Consider what your assignment asks you to do

Sample assignment 1

Sample assignment 2

Developing a Thesis Statement–Additional information

Derive a main point from topic

Look for patterns in your evidence

Purpose statement

Derive purpose statement from topic

Compose a draft thesis statement

Question-to-Assertion

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

Refine and polish the thesis statement

Sample Assignment

Complete the final thesis statement

Writing Process and Structure

Getting Started with Your Paper

Creating an Argument

Working with Sources

Drafting Your Paper

Revising Your Paper

Finishing Your Paper

Writing Collaboratively

Writing a Paper: Thesis Statements

Being Specific

Making a Unique Argument

Creating a Debate