Fake Thesis vs. Absent Thesis

Yesterday I complained about a stand-alone chapter whose opening and especially closing paragraphs immediately made me think it was low quality, which was correct. Today I want to talk about something that looks similar, but isn’t.

The chapter I complained about was the last chapter in Children in Colonial America (affiliate link), but it turns out CiCA is the third book in a series on the history of childhood in America, all in the same format with the same editor. This lets me minimize variables as I compare chapters. Then as luck would have it, the first chapter of the first-published book, Children and Youth in the New Republic (affiliate link), was the perfect foil for Chapter 12 of Children in Colonial America.

Chapter 1 of …New Republic, “Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution: The Effects of War on Society”, demonstrates a fairly common pattern. The author has a bunch of data and no single frame to capture it all, so they say something like “X is a complicated subject. Different people related to it in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons.” In the particular case of Boy Soldiers… X is “boys/young men fighting for America in the Revolutionary War”, and the variety is “Some boys chose to fight for patriotism, material advancement, or to help their family. Some but not all did this against their parents’ objections. Other boys were forced to fight by their families over their objections.”

Or in more words

The factors that drew these soldiers into the service indicate the great diversity of experience in boyhood in revolutionary America. In the glimpses we have of them and their families at the moment of enlistment, we see that some enjoyed the care and protection of their parents while others suffered at the hands of mercenary ones. Some went to war against their parents’ inclinations while others were thrust into it over their own objections. A few boys thought that the army would be a more hospitable place than the places they lived or that it would be an escape from jobs that were tedious and frustrating. For many more, military service was an issue around which they could negotiate with their fathers when they wanted opportunities that could take them away from home. Some saw a real opportunity to contribute to the financial well-being of their families. They could do this either directly by turning over their pay or bounty money or indirectly by substituting for an older family member, allowing the more needed laborer to stay home, or by relieving their families of the need to support and feed them. A few, such as Josiah Brandon, were drawn by the cause itself to set their own course.

Boyer, Paul S.. Children and Youth in a New Nation (Children and Youth in America) (pp. 26-27). NYU Press short. Kindle Edition.

The chapter consists of first hand accounts of different boys enlisting in the army for different reasons, and some comments on the state of the evidence.

I could easily see a world where the same amount of actual facts, models, and and narratives led to both the theses of the style of Chapter 1 of CaYiaNN and Chapter 12 of CiCA, depending on writing skill and adherence to a guide book but independent of the quality of information or author understanding. “Iunno” and “A bunch of things happened for a bunch of reasons” are both good descriptions of a pile of data you don’t have a cohesive explanation for. If anything I’d expect “Iunno” to be associated with higher quality works, since it’s more honest. That’s clearly not happening in these cases, although obviously a sample size of two is too small to draw any conclusions.