Sample Assignment

Here is a sample thesis paragraph and list of premises, based on a famous Monty Python sketch:

 

 My Theory

by Anne Elk

All Brontosauruses are little at one end, get big in the middle, and are little again at the other end. A Brontosaurus is a large, herbiverous, land-based dinosaur living in the Jurassic period. “Little” and “big” are of course vague terms; the claim is merely that the middle of the Brontosaurus is very much bigger relative to the two ends, so the absolute values are immaterial. This claim might appear too obvious to need demonstration, but several prominent paleontologists have seemed in their writings (for example: Gould, 2001, Eldridge, 1994) to suggest otherwise.

•   All known fossil remains of Brontosauri have the prescribed shape.

•  Fossil remains of smaller dinosaurs thought to be ancestral to the Brontosaurus have similar shapes.

• As with all vertebrates, he shapes of dinosaurs are largely determined by heredity from the shapes of their parents.

• Leading scientific journals refer regularly and unproblematically to the iconic shape of the Brontosaurus.