[rfahrney63]

Hello. Thank you for your time in answering this question! Some ideas we had for a thesis paper were women’s place in life and morals, racial inequality, or transcendentalism. Are these topics what you are looking for or should I redirect them to another topic? I am not sure exactly what is preferred. Any suggestions are welcome! Thanks again. Have a blessed day.

[Ben Crist]

Hi there! Good thesis papers could come from those topics, yes. The key difference between a research paper and a thesis paper is that the latter is driven by a question that guides your student through the topic. For example, not everything about Transcendentalism needs to be presented in the paper. In fact, you might not cover a lot of the history of Transcendentalism at all if the guiding question was “Is The Red Badge of Courage a Transcendental novel?” If the answer were no but the student was still interested in the book, she might want to know why not? If the answer was yes, then the argument of the paper could be as simple as “RBC is a Transcendental novel because of reason#1, reason#2, and reason#3.”

I’m happy to help further. Expository writing is really fun!