What do you need to see in an email or memo asking for help with my midterm paper's thesis?

        Think of what I'm asking you to do--show me you can read and interpret a piece of the literature we're reading.  Until I see the passage(s) you're thinking of interpreting/explaining, and the line of explanation you're thinking of pursuing, I can't tell whether you've got a real thesis or only a potential topic you're guessing about.  In brief, I want specific passages with proper references, an assertion (thesis) about what they mean, and a suggestion of the logic that would support the argument.  Here's a sample email from a student who knows well what I'm expecting to see in such a document.  The only thing that's missing here is the supporting logic, which could generate many different papers from the same idea about this relationship.

I was impressed with Shakespeare's depiction of the weather forecasting (ahem..) Lear's state in Act III.  The dramatic storm mimics Lear's rage and foreshadows his insanity as it builds. 
 "The king is in high rage." 
"Shut up your doors, my lord; 'tis a wild night...Come out o' the storm."
 
[act III,  lines 3-11, p 1147]
 
Kent:  I know you. Where's the king?
Gentleman: Contending with the fretful elements;
Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,
Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main,
That things might change or cease; tears his white hair,
Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage,
Catch in their fury, and make nothing of;
Strives in his little world of man to out-scorn
The to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain.
 
What or should I say whom do the wind and rain symbolize?
 
-Risa

My reply redirects Risa to the logic which supports her claim that the storm should be understood to "mimic" or "foreshadow" something about Lear.  Elizabethan doctrines about the king's relationship to Nature and to the health of the Kingdom (parodied by Edmund in I.3.117-31) could help support that.  My real curiosity is about the poet's choice of symbols for states of emotion.  Where have we seen them used this way before?