This spring I took a class called "The Art of Oral Presentation," and today was our last meeting. Our final assignment was to write and deliver a valediction, or farewell. During class we raced through 11 speeches, and it was interesting to hear my classmates' various perspectives. The following is what I wrote for the class: a farewell to the thesis driven essay, as representative of my career as a student.
"I vividly remember the moment when I understood what it meant to write a thesis-driven argument. I was in tenth grade, and Mr. Wood was my English teacher. He taught me how to collect my ideas into organized points and state them with painstaking clarity, and I felt like he was stealing my soul. I thought bullet points were bullshit and found absolutely no poetry in paper-writing.
"For seven years after this moment of realization, I have waged war against the thesis. In high school I struggled to spin strange arguments about Plato’s philosophy the motivations of Hamlet, and here at Carleton my struggles became battles as I wrote about big things that should be capitalized like Consciousness and Beauty and Truth. With every crisp articulation of an argument I felt more acutely the failure of my words to express what I was trying to say.
"I’ve never had a child, but, by the end of my senior year of college, I’ve come to figuratively conceive of the paper-writing process as a sort of birthing. After waiting until the last possible instant to start writing, I agonizingly construct some sort of thesis, and then cling with some doubt to my argument as words painfully come forth. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve sat in a Sayles classroom into the nether-hours with grim determination and a rapidly cooling cup of coffee, and I sold my soul to the second floor of the library when I decided to write my comps about that which cannot be defined. According to my calculations, I’ve written upwards of 500 pages during my undergraduate career, and it scares me to contemplate how many hours I spend laboring to bring forth this vast progeny of papers.
"But now I have one day of class left before I indefinitely end my career as a student, and my war against the thesis is over. I’m graduating from Carleton, and I’ve written all my papers. Never again will I purchase a large dark roast and disappear into the lonely recesses of my own confusion. Never again will my heart sink at the sight of a blank document and a blinking space bar. Never again will I laugh at the ironic fact that the universe cannot be crammed into a coherent, crisp unfolding of points.
"And, although my relationship with paper-writing has been tumultuous at best, I’m a little sad to see it go. I don’t know exactly when I began to see beautiful side of carefully rendered structure and syntax, but, strangely, I’ve come to appreciate the painful process.
"This is how I think about it: in Greek mythology there’s this guy named Sisyphus, a man who was doomed for all of eternity to push a boulder up a mountainside only for it to slide down again, and again, and again. The existentialist writer Albert Camus wrote that Sisyphys represents humanity, and that there is only hope for us if we can imagine Sisyphus to be happy with his fate. I like to think of the thesis-driven argument as my boulder, and, as per Camus’ advice, I’ve come to love it as much as I hate it. Over time I’ve managed to find something almost noble in the impossible task of writing life down in comprehensible terms, and now my frustrated engagement with that task is over.
"Since paper-writing has been such a staple of my education, in my mind the thesis is inevitably linked to my Carleton experience. I guess it’s natural then, that, as my college career draws to a close, I’m almost frantically grasping for some coherent binding statement to sum up my time in Minnesota. I want to lie out my college career in bullet points so that I can wrap my head around it and make it mean something.
"The thing I hated most about writing papers was the conclusion. For some reason, the last sentence is always the hardest."
"I vividly remember the moment when I understood what it meant to write a thesis-driven argument. I was in tenth grade, and Mr. Wood was my English teacher. He taught me how to collect my ideas into organized points and state them with painstaking clarity, and I felt like he was stealing my soul. I thought bullet points were bullshit and found absolutely no poetry in paper-writing.
"For seven years after this moment of realization, I have waged war against the thesis. In high school I struggled to spin strange arguments about Plato’s philosophy the motivations of Hamlet, and here at Carleton my struggles became battles as I wrote about big things that should be capitalized like Consciousness and Beauty and Truth. With every crisp articulation of an argument I felt more acutely the failure of my words to express what I was trying to say.
"I’ve never had a child, but, by the end of my senior year of college, I’ve come to figuratively conceive of the paper-writing process as a sort of birthing. After waiting until the last possible instant to start writing, I agonizingly construct some sort of thesis, and then cling with some doubt to my argument as words painfully come forth. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve sat in a Sayles classroom into the nether-hours with grim determination and a rapidly cooling cup of coffee, and I sold my soul to the second floor of the library when I decided to write my comps about that which cannot be defined. According to my calculations, I’ve written upwards of 500 pages during my undergraduate career, and it scares me to contemplate how many hours I spend laboring to bring forth this vast progeny of papers.
"But now I have one day of class left before I indefinitely end my career as a student, and my war against the thesis is over. I’m graduating from Carleton, and I’ve written all my papers. Never again will I purchase a large dark roast and disappear into the lonely recesses of my own confusion. Never again will my heart sink at the sight of a blank document and a blinking space bar. Never again will I laugh at the ironic fact that the universe cannot be crammed into a coherent, crisp unfolding of points.
"And, although my relationship with paper-writing has been tumultuous at best, I’m a little sad to see it go. I don’t know exactly when I began to see beautiful side of carefully rendered structure and syntax, but, strangely, I’ve come to appreciate the painful process.
"This is how I think about it: in Greek mythology there’s this guy named Sisyphus, a man who was doomed for all of eternity to push a boulder up a mountainside only for it to slide down again, and again, and again. The existentialist writer Albert Camus wrote that Sisyphys represents humanity, and that there is only hope for us if we can imagine Sisyphus to be happy with his fate. I like to think of the thesis-driven argument as my boulder, and, as per Camus’ advice, I’ve come to love it as much as I hate it. Over time I’ve managed to find something almost noble in the impossible task of writing life down in comprehensible terms, and now my frustrated engagement with that task is over.
"Since paper-writing has been such a staple of my education, in my mind the thesis is inevitably linked to my Carleton experience. I guess it’s natural then, that, as my college career draws to a close, I’m almost frantically grasping for some coherent binding statement to sum up my time in Minnesota. I want to lie out my college career in bullet points so that I can wrap my head around it and make it mean something.
"The thing I hated most about writing papers was the conclusion. For some reason, the last sentence is always the hardest."
Well said, Cait.
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