Know Whether You Are Testing or Arguing

An essay announces a discovery and merely wanders, and its reader waits for a point that does not come. A story makes every character exist to be refuted, and its reader feels a thumb on the scale. In each, one job is dressed as the other.

Fiction can argue, and essays and memoirs can test, so the form won’t say which job a project is doing. A premise sets a condition, follows its consequences honestly, and accepts what turns up, including results the writer did not want. A thesis asserts something contestable, gives reasons and evidence, and answers the strongest objection. Both are legitimate.

Mary Shelley had a premise in its purest form. In the wet summer of 1816, near Geneva, Lord Byron proposed that each member of the party write a ghost story, and Shelley recalls in her 1831 introduction that she could not think of one and was asked each morning whether she had. Then came a night of talk between Byron and Percy Shelley about whether the principle of life could ever be discovered, about galvanism, and about the idea that the parts of a creature might be manufactured and endued with vital warmth. When she lay down she neither slept nor thought. With shut eyes she saw “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” and the thing beginning to stir.

Swift wrote a thesis in costume. A Modest Proposal (1729) proposes, in the calm voice of a political economist, that the poor of Ireland sell their children as food. Near the end the argument surfaces in a list of what he refuses to hear. Let no man talk to him of other expedients, he says: taxing absentees at five shillings a pound, living on native manufactures, teaching landlords some mercy, putting honesty and skill into shopkeepers, until he has some glimpse of hope that there will ever be a hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice. The real thesis, a program of reform that Swift says nobody has seriously tried, lives in that list, and only the route to it is disguised.

If the work’s outcome could contradict your hopes, you are testing. If the outcome is fixed, you are arguing, and the honest move is to build the case. Readers of a test trust that the consequences were followed honestly, and cheating there means steering the result. Readers of an argument trust that the evidence was fairly gathered and the opposition fairly represented (Practice 74), and cheating there is pretending to discover what you came to defend.

The categories drift. A premise can harden in revision into a claim the writer then defends, and a reader can take Frankenstein as arguing something even though Shelley says she set out to speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and to awaken thrilling horror. A work may move from one job to the other, provided the writer notices (Chapter 2 considers how purpose shifts as the Work does).

Practice. Write both for the same project. First, a premise: “Suppose [a condition]. What follows for [whom or what]?” Second, a thesis: “[A claim], because [a reason], even though [the strongest objection].” Decide which one the project is serving, and run the matching check. For the premise, write two sentences describing a result you would not want and ask whether the draft could honestly arrive there. For the thesis, write the objection in terms its strongest defender would accept. Stop at twenty-five minutes. A test is finished when you know something you did not; an argument is finished when a fair-minded reader could be moved by it.