Thesis statements

All right, all.  Here are two thesis statements that your classmates sent in.  I was hoping to have 12 other ones.  Send them on to me, post haste, please.

1.  It is always enjoyable to interpret photographs, whether they are easy to understand or not, but I feel photos that portray the studium point of view are easier to relate to.

2.  Horses have been a fun and useful animal for many generations. Today lots of people look at horses as entertaining, like horse back riding, or horses racing, but we still don't use horses as we used to.  Back in the day, horses were used for transportation, farming, fighting, and many other things.  Machines took the place of horses, like cars and trucks.

Please take some time to read them and consider what might make them stronger theses.  Also, please comment with your thoughts.

14 April 2008 Poem

Today's poem is by M. L. Smoker.

I chose it because I think it's such a great poem for the way it feels when the seasons start to change—that kind of intensified attention we pay to the world around us, the way everything is responding to the change.

I also think it deals, as a poem, with one of the problems of poetry well—how to account for the poet in a poem about the world. I don't know if I'm expressing that well. Basically, I think there's this tension in a lot of poems between the small universe of one person's perceptions and the large universe that she or he perceives.

Any questions, observations, please comment here.

What makes a thesis statement good?

We have talked about thesis statements throughout the semester in different contexts. What I'd like to do with this post is start brainstorming some of the qualities that a good thesis possesses. So, what are some?

I'll get the ball rolling:
A good thesis should be detailed enough to be worth arguing. "Most cats have fur," for instance, is not a detailed enough thesis.

Other qualities? Please reply in the comments section.