Discovering the Thesis in Your Evidence

        Inexperienced college writers try to invent a thesis by "intuition" and then look at the evidence to find something that might support their intuited thesis.  Experienced college writers develop theses from the evidence by detecting patterns or pattern breaking in the evidence.  Remember the advantage of "The Grid" for pulling your evidence out of your sources' order and into an order in which you can see patterns.  Click on the links below to see examples of

1) a pattern in the evidence that can be interpreted to make meaning, or

2) the discovery of a violation of such a pattern that can be interpreted to make meaning. 

Identifying pattern-making and pattern breaking rules are the scholar's best sources of insight.