University Writing Program

Explaining Motive

At this point, "Motive" is a writing concept I find easy to explain, but students usually stumble over it. Even those that can echo its definition usually struggle to identify a motive in an argumentative essay we read in class. They often ask, "How is motive different from the thesis, again?"

To some degree, I think that problem is ineradicable. For one, motives don't always appear in discrete sentences within the essays we read. They often arrive as dependent clauses in and around the thesis statement, and they are sometimes merely implicit. Secondly, the concept also demands that students think of their claims as situated with relation to readers. The only thing that makes a claim motivated, after all, is the readers’ relationship to it. If the whole world agreed that "Blurred Lines" endorsed a cultural regime of misogyny and rape, then this parody by Mod Carousel would be unmotivated drivel:

My students sometimes struggle with imagining a plausible audience. Some simply don’t know what the general public already knows. Others are too invested in getting the assignment done to take the time to imagine a genuinely intelligent reader.

Despite these difficulties, I think there are ways to explain “motive” that prove useful over the course of the semester. Below are three options you might use. If anyone wants to share alternatives, please send them my way.
    1. Gordon Harvey's "Elements of the Academic Essay" offers some foundational terms for explaining the basic content of argumentative writing. His definition of Motive is as follows:
    Motive: the intellectual context that you establish for your topic and thesis at the start of your essay, in order to suggest why someone, besides your instructor, might want to read an essay on this topic or need to hear your particular thesis argued—why your thesis isn’t just obvious to all, why other people might hold other theses (that you think are wrong). Your motive should be aimed at your audience: it won’t necessarily be the reason you first got interested in the topic (which could be private and idiosyncratic) or the personal motivation behind your engagement with the topic. Indeed it’s where you suggest that your argument isn’t idiosyncratic, but rather is generally interesting. The motive you set up should be genuine: a misapprehension or puzzle that an intelligent reader (not a straw dummy) would really have, a point that such a reader would really overlook. Defining motive should be the main business of your introductory paragraphs, where it is usually introduced by a form of the complicating word “But.”
  2. Some instructors demand that students always articulate their motive as a question…a question that their thesis claim answers. This is useful, in part, because students who do it put their often implied assumptions about what they’re up to into coherent sentences. This often either exposes a flaw in their thinking or pushes them toward a better, more interesting question. If you choose this route, you can ask students to include that question in their cover letters or identify what they think their peers’ motive questions are during peer review. I also occasionally find it easier to workshop thesis statements in conferences by playing around with students' motivating questions. 
  3. I usually describe motive as a structural relationship between the thesis claim and some kind of starting position.* Many instructors find it productive to demand that students isolate motive within a specific sentence in their essays (a practice I think is entirely reasonable). But I think that, when we find motives in the writing we see in the world, they usually aren’t fully articulated within discrete sentences. Rather, they’re merely gestured toward or half-said at the beginning or end of the piece. So, I usually propose the following formula (which is hardly revolutionary):
Thesis = the governing claim of the essay
Motive = the starting point to which the thesis claim responds (i.e. the state of knowledge or belief which is revised by the argument of the essay).

The "starting point" can take a number of shapes, including:
  1. A commonly held opinion or the opinion of experts (i.e. the status quo)
  2. An unresolved disagreement between experts
  3. An implicit puzzle in the data or text
  4. A gap in knowledge
  5. A first impression or obvious interpretation

That list is not exhaustive, probably, but it covers most of what your students will be up to in all three units. I ask students to identify the starting position for every essay we read in class; I ask them to explain their own starting positions in our conferences, and I ask them to use the concept to make sense of their peers’ thesis statements.

*In the past, I've used the term “status quo” to cover this broad idea of a "starting position." Of course, status quo popularly means something like "common opinion." Occasionally, my students have forgotten about items 2 through 5 above (the other types of starting positions) because they focus on the idea of reversing a common opinion. I'm giving "starting position" a try now to see if that helps my students think more flexibly. 

 

Nick Van Kley (2013)