If your thesis falls at the lowest level of knowledge, your paper will be nothing more than a report or a survey. This is fine if that's all you intend your paper to be. But if you intend your paper to be more than a report, you must develop a thesis that is more than a statement of fact.

Low level: "In experiments conducted by the American Cancer Institue, 70 percent of the rats subjected to cigarette smoke over a two-year period died of lung cancer."

If this is your thesis, your paper can hardly develop into anything more than a report about the experiments and their results. However, if you draw some conclusion from this statement of fact and make that your thesis, you advance to Adler's second order of knowledge: statements about facts.

Higher level : "Scientific experiments suggest a close link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer,"

or a less cautious assertion: "Cigarette smoking is the major cause of lung cancer."

With either of these theses, you have an argument on your hands. You have made a statement that is not entirely self-evident, one that will not be universally agreed with, one that you will have to defend. But if you risk one step further and make a statement about this statement, you generate the spark of a potentially informative, provocative, and animated essay.

Highest level: "The laws of the United States should be amended to prohibit the production and sale of cigarettes."

Adler would classify a thesis of this order as a statement about statements. As such, it not only makes possible a more stimulating essay, it also allow you to develop your essay logically by referring back to statements at the two lower levels: you present arguments (statements about facts) to support your thesis, and facts and examples (statements of fact) to support your arguments.

For example, to support the thesis that laws should be amended to prohibit the production and sale of cigarettes, you can draw upon the argument that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer; and to support this argument, you can draw upon the fact that in ACI experiments, 70 percent of the rats subjected to cigarette smoke died of lung cancer.

Thus, a thesis that is a statement about statements allows you to develop a layered effect that is impossible to achieve in a simple report or survey.

From materials developed by
Craig Waddell
The Writing Center
4508 Sage Laboratory
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute