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  • this is a dumb question, but how on earth does one get an interpretive thesis? everything I've come up with just sounds like it's describing stuff that happened, and I'm starting to think I'm just not cut out for writing this stuff....

oh man, okay, here is how to write an interpretive thesis:

find a but.

the easiest way to make your thesis interpretive is to have a “but” moment. It’s where you set up a particular picture of what other people might think is going on, and then you point out why that picture is incorrect, because X.

like my friend’s thesis which was “you may think that bioethics came into being in the wake of the the nuremburg trials, BUT the tuskegee syphilis experiments showed that these standards had yet to permeate the wider scientific culture”

or my thesis, which was “because of the way medical ethics developed as a discipline, it tends to focus on medicine through the lens of the clinical encounter BUT in our changing healthcare system, that is no longer a valid approach to take on the question of ethical practice”

it’s helpful if you find a lot of scholarship, or an influential scholar who you can disagree with; if you’re pushing back an established view within your field, or general knowledge. Most theses begin with a disagreement of some kind, and it’s a very fruitful place to begin.

I would also say there’s nothing wrong with….not writing a “but” thesis? One of my friends wrote his thesis on the intersection on current brain research, education, and those online services that claim to boost your brainpower. There’s not a lot of research in that specific area, so his was an exploratory thesis, suggesting a theory of its own based on what he had found. If you’re already in a well-trod field with lots of literature around your topic, though, that might be harder.

Talk it over with your advisor! They should be able to point you in the right direction, or at least suggest some more avenues of research.