This is an essay I wrote as the Final for my Intro to Rhetoric and Composition class. The goal of the assignment was to rhetorically review one of the previous assignments from the semester. I asked my professor if I could make the essay review itself. She laughed, but agreed it was a valid interpretation of the assignment.
To this day, it is the most fun I've ever had with an essay.
Through the course work of my rhetorical analysis class, essays that I have written accumulate one major break from the contemporary format. Each one of my essays misses the one major factor the introduction of every essay must have: The thesis statement. I enjoy implementing my own style of writing in my paper's organization and I craft each paragraph to wrap up my essays with a solid conclusion, but my essays lack an initial claim. This paper is written for my professor and classmates in rhetorical analysis. My purpose is to demonstrate that I can create a text for my audience and clearly articulate the rhetorical choices of this essay. This essay itself will be scrutinized, but not by another essay. This is an essay that will rhetorically analyze itself. Each paragraph will judge the argument preceding it. It will deconstruct my own writing style through unpacking itself and will unveil the purpose for each of my rhetorical choices.
In the process of pitching the order of this essay and my purpose I missed the entire point of an introductory paragraph: the communication of this essay's main claim. I portrayed the structure of the essay and what makes it unique, but I named no claim, no conclusion, no call-to-action, and no clear point. Such a mistake cripples the essay's expected flow and leaves the reader guessing what the essay is even saying! As Purdue Owl says, "you need a clear thesis statement at the end of your introduction so that your reader understands your main point and knows what to expect from the rest of your essay" ("Thesis Statements"). The lack of a thesis statement skews from the expectations of essays. At this point, can this piece of writing even be called an essay?
A non-critical survey of the last paragraph's points suggests that the omission of the topic sentence is a blunder that can never be used in "good" writing. The final claim appeals to tradition and builds copious amounts of alliteration to make the reader charge through the entire paragraph with the all-important general claim, but that claim is not necessarily true. French essayist and author, Montaigne, dabbled in building essays with the subject at the conclusion. By skirting the subject until the end, Montaigne led readers along the arguments. When the subject was finally unveiled, the reader could think retrospectively of the entire essay. A thesis is not necessarily needed to engage the audience.
In a basic essay, a single central point is defined and proven through the course of a few pages. Essays aren't meant to portray a "eureka!" moment, but to produce from the audience an outspread murmur of "I see". I am not a veteran essayist. My fields are novel-writing and high-fantasy fiction. When I branch into other genres, my style in writing novels bleeds through. Essays are made to assume a single, centralized thought. Novels, meanwhile, are ordered to build rising action. A novel is built upon increasing rising action towards a climax, which marks the point of greatest tension. Directly following the climax, the plot sorts itself out towards the denouement. My essay-writing style attempts to harness rising action for a final retrospective "aha!" moment, just as how Montaigne only stalls graphing out his main theme to the audience to build a fuller picture of his message. The ultimate purpose of omitting the thesis statement was to give opportunity to create "the sublime" in an essay. Cassius Longinus, the Roman teacher who coined the term, "the sublime" called it a force that carries the hearer, "not to persuasion but to ecstasy" (60). It is a feeling of intense awe before a subject, a deep wonder at the immensity of some great thing. Through the paragraphs of this essay is an attempt to build the debate's tension to a place to force a dramatic and spontaneous flash of understanding to the format and purpose of this essay. This method, if successful in its goal, would make an essay with a subject matter better portrayed, better taught and better retained than the predictable format of the informative draft.
An essay without a main point could be properly executed to produce an instance of the sublime, but even if it were to succeed, the essay's audience would be too lost to appreciate it. In all rhetoric, the art of persuasion depends on the grasp of the audience, and this requires the use of Aristotle's three forms of persuasion: A properly founded ethos, an emotional appeal to place the audience in the frame of mind needed and a logical argument the audience can follow ("On Rhetoric" 181). Aristotle calls rhetoric important because it is needed to persuade audiences who could not be otherwise persuaded ("On Rhetoric" 180), and that means rhetoric is only as useful as it reaches its audience. As great as it may sound to supply an instance of the sublime, unless the audience understands what I am doing as well as I do, there will be no hope for proper translation. An audience can only understand a piece of rhetoric as well as they can decipher its meaning, and an essay without a thesis statement is an example of a format too obscure to be readable by the average reader.
Throughout the points and counterpoints of this essay, this entire piece has been implementing rising action as a rhetorical tool. The introduction stated the objective of the essay. The first discourse voiced the initial stasis on the lacking a thesis statement. This both introduced the essay's primary conflict and provided primary tension. That paragraph's use of alliteration forced the reader to scan the page faster forwards this idea. Following that was the counterargument to the aforementioned skepticism. By omitting the thesis statement in the introduction, the clashing of the first argument and its counterargument left no hint of which position was right, adding more to the piece's dramatic tension. The initial rebuttal used strong adjectives and an appeal to tradition to build a persuasive pathos, while its counterargument provided examples of exceptions and logic to counter. It implemented a base logos. The following paragraph of deeper inspection delved into my experience and understanding of novel-writing to prove I understood how my writing style merged with my essay construction. That point based itself upon a persuasive ethos. The final counterargument used a logical appeal to provide more information that argues that the inadequacy of stalling the thesis and supported the impression of a unified thought by combining sentences with "and". This paragraph, this reflexive analysis, is a transition marker to alert the audience that the dramatic tension has been topped. This essay has reached the climax, where this essay's true claim, its thesis statement, will be stated.
The main claim of the fifth paragraph was that "an essay without a thesis statement is a format too obscure to be readable by the average reader." In this there is a subtle omission. Hidden in the introduction is everything this paper needed. The paragraph's fourth sentence says, "This paper is written for my professor and classmates in rhetorical analysis." It is true that an essay without a thesis statement would be difficult for an average reader to follow, but this essay isn't built for an average reader. It is crafted for college students, English and Writing majors learned enough in rhetoric to decipher and appreciate the subtleties of this essay.
The introduction and first paragraph stated only that the thesis statement was left out, not that there was no thesis at all. This primes observant readers, including my target audience, to start looking for the thesis statement. I made the following sections a debate over what the thesis could be. The dealings of this material provide two possible claims for this essay: a thesis statement ought only to be in the introduction or a thesis statement can be introduced at any juncture in the essay. This accrues to two major functions: to provide a debate fashioned for a specific audience and to explain the function and purpose of each rhetorical tool. These functions mirror the purpose I set down at this essay's introduction: "to demonstrate that I can create a text for my audience and clearly articulate my rhetorical choices." By doing nothing more than hiding the thesis statement, I wrote a reflexive, analytical essay to fulfill my purpose and reach my target audience. The thesis statement is that "the thesis statement is a rhetorical tool like any other that, should the author be skilled enough, can be introduced at any juncture in the essay." Aristotle defined rhetoric as, "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" ("On Rhetoric" 181). This essay used the lack of a thesis statement, to create a debate to prove by example that a thesis statement can be put anywhere, and that means this essay successfully fulfilled its purpose.
Works Cited:
The Purdue OWL. Purdue U Writing Lab, 2016.
Aristotle., and George A. Kennedy. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.
Montaigne, Michel. Montaigne's Essays. Renascence Editions. Translated by John Florio. 10 April 2005. mises.ch/library/Montaigne_Essays_Florio_Translation.pdf. Accessed 3/24/17.