Now you’re ready to explore your question more deeply with additional brainstorming, clustering, or freewriting. The final answer to your Focus Question will be the focus or thesis of your argument essay paper.

Proper Planning makes writing your first paper draft easy. Now go back to your original focus question and write it down at the top of a page. Then answer the question in one sentence using your readings and your own values, opinions, thoughts, and attitudes. You will find this information in your brainstorming and freewriting notes. It might help to form your thesis into the subject (your previous focus question) and the significance of the question (the So What?).

Remember, to consider who your audience is—the instructor and other students. This is who you are writing for. In your writing consider the nature of your audience and how much they know about your topic. Also consider the values and expectations regarding your topic. Draw a mental picture of your audience reading your paper. It is your primary purpose to persuade with this paper, so you much present and support a good argument as well as provide information and entertain your readers.

Focus Question: What is Isaac Bashevis Singer saying about the Jews after the Holocaust in NYC (in Shadows on the Hudson)?

Answer/Thesis: In Shadows on the Hudson, Singer is saying that the Jews after the Holocaust experienced impossible moral tension as a result of knowing obliquely their religious heritage and not being able to live it out because of a lack of faith due to the Holocaust—once they left their heritage, they left their identity and felt only isolation.

An organization plan is not a formal outline, but a method of organizing your ideas in a progressive or logical arrangement as well as determining the purpose and relevance of each idea or evidence in your paper, kind of like a loose road map. This will help you to stay on focus.

It may have taken your several tries to get your thesis sentence in its final working form—this is normal. But it’s important to get the wording and phrasing just right.

Your next step—Organizing your ideas (again make two columns):

On the left side, place your key points or ideas; examples.

On the right side, show your reasoning or purpose of including this material.

Focus Question: How does McBride use his narrative metaphors to help achieve his goals of self-discovery and to form a tribute to his white mother?

Answer or Thesis: In writing a tribute to his mother in The Color of Water, James McBride uses a series of metaphors and similes that increase in frequency and depth as his narrative becomes more personal and self-revealing, allowing him to discover himself as he unravels his own secretly guarded heritage.