Some Thoughts on Research & Writing - Part 2

Making a Thesis Work for You

A good initial thesis is a time saver. Once you have a thesis, like our example in Part 1, "The ironclad ships used by the North and South in the American Civil War represented a huge step forward in the Navy's wartime technology," you will know what you need to research. For example, this thesis eliminates the need to research anything about Civil War era politicians and issues, causes of the war, or even battles that didn't involve the Monitor or the Merrimac. This thesis allows you to narrow your field of research to ironclad ships used in the Civil War and how they changed the way naval battles were fought. It also gives you some keywords to begin your search.


If you started with the keywords "American Civil War" and did a search on ASK.com, you would get 9,518,000 hits. That may seem great at first, but you are going to have to spend a lot of time skimming through many of those potential sources before you know which ones will work for you.

However, by using your thesis, you can start with the keywords "ironclad ships in the American Civil War," which will give you fewer, but more targeted hits. Using those keywords on ASK.com lowers the number of hits to 13,300, somewhat easier to sort through, but probably still too many.

So since your thesis focuses on the technology of the ironclad ships, if you add that to your keywords and try "the improved technology of the ironclad ships in the American Civil War" on ASK.com, you can narrow it down to 2,050 hits. When you look at some of them, you find out that there were other ironclad ships used during the Civil War, including a submarine, and that wasn't really what you wanted to talk about in your paper.

So you can go back to ASK.com and revise your key words one more time to "the improved technology of the Monitor and the Merrimac in the American Civil War" which will give you only 216 hits. Now you've got an amount of infromation that is much easier to handle!

Unfortunately, now that you know the Monitor and the Merrimac weren't the only ironclads, your thesis doesn't quite work. So what do you do? You change the thesis to make it more specific. From "The ironclad ships used by the North and South in the American Civil War represented a huge step forward in the Navy's wartime technology," you can revise your thesis to "The ironclad ships the Monitor and the Merrimac used by the North and South in the American Civil War represented a huge step forward in the Navy's wartime technology." Now the thesis and the research match, and you can begin working with your sources.