Brooks
New member
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2026
- Messages
- 11
In high school my teachers wanted five paragraph essays with thesis statements that were basically "thing A and thing B and thing C are all important about topic X." That worked fine. I got A's. I felt smart.
Then I got to college and my first paper back literally said "this is summary, not argument. where is your claim?" and I didn't even know what that meant!! I thought a claim was just... what you were going to talk about?? Nobody told me it had to be debatable. Nobody told me it had to be specific. Nobody told me that "Hamlet is a complex character" would get me laughed out of a college classroom but apparently that's the reality we live in.
The worst part is that unlearning the high school formula has been genuinely painful. My brain wants to write five paragraphs with an intro that lists three points. That structure is comfortable. But my professors want me to make a single interesting argument and then explore it from different angles and that requires a claim that actually has some depth to it. My last paper was on police body cameras and my claim ended up being "while body cameras are promoted as accountability tools, their effectiveness is undermined by discretionary activation policies and selective footage release, ultimately serving institutional interests more than public transparency."
That sentence is longer than my entire high school thesis statements used to be
but it actually argues something!! Someone could disagree!! I have to prove it with evidence!! It's terrifying honestly because now I can't hide behind vague language anymore. I have to actually take a position and defend it. But also my grades are going up so maybe the terror is worth it?? Anyone else dealing with this adjustment or is it just me?
Then I got to college and my first paper back literally said "this is summary, not argument. where is your claim?" and I didn't even know what that meant!! I thought a claim was just... what you were going to talk about?? Nobody told me it had to be debatable. Nobody told me it had to be specific. Nobody told me that "Hamlet is a complex character" would get me laughed out of a college classroom but apparently that's the reality we live in.
The worst part is that unlearning the high school formula has been genuinely painful. My brain wants to write five paragraphs with an intro that lists three points. That structure is comfortable. But my professors want me to make a single interesting argument and then explore it from different angles and that requires a claim that actually has some depth to it. My last paper was on police body cameras and my claim ended up being "while body cameras are promoted as accountability tools, their effectiveness is undermined by discretionary activation policies and selective footage release, ultimately serving institutional interests more than public transparency."
That sentence is longer than my entire high school thesis statements used to be
but it actually argues something!! Someone could disagree!! I have to prove it with evidence!! It's terrifying honestly because now I can't hide behind vague language anymore. I have to actually take a position and defend it. But also my grades are going up so maybe the terror is worth it?? Anyone else dealing with this adjustment or is it just me?