This is a timely question, because I had just such a writer come to me in the writing center Wednesday afternoon. The assignment, for a 3080 class, was to write a five page response paper to a short story of the writer's choosing demonstrating a working knowledge of one of the endorsed approaches. The writer chose to deconstruct "The Most Dangerous Game." I'm sure most of us are familiar with Richard Connell's story. I had to tell the writer that I thought her thesis statement appeared at the bottom of page four of her five page paper. The preceding almost-four pages were a warm-up session, and she finally articulated what she wanted to write about with about three paragraphs to go. She agreed with me and asked if that meant the first four pages of her paper would have to be scrapped. I told her I didn't think that was the case, that with a little tweaking the "warm up" material could be put to good use supporting her thesis, now that she could consciously write towards it. But, I told her, she would need to do some reorganization. Out came the sticky notes (the big ones, not the little ones). I gave her a checklist of five sentences that amounted to her thesis statement broken down into an Aristotelian "A is A" form. On a second piece of paper I wrote: (1) Thesis. I told her that her task was to argue that this statement was true. I told her that since we'd broken her thesis down into five statements, she could argue that each statement was true, and that would constitute defending her thesis. I asked her to look at the first statement and find something in her paper that represented it. Under "thesis" on my sheet of paper I wrote this first statement. Under it I wrote "Bread crum" and next to it, a marker for the corresponding passage from her paper. Under that, I wrote "proof" and a marker for the corresponding textual evidence as she had already cited it in her paper. We worked through all five points of the thesis this way. A few of the points had not been already addressed in her paper, and a few things that had been in her paper had to be scrapped because they had nothing to do with her new thesis. I think the important things she took away from our session were that if a thing seems at first overwhelming, its a good idea to simplify it by breaking it down into a handful of manageable things. I modeled a "can-do" attitude for her, and gave her an effective method for organizing a paper around a thesis. She also understood the difference between textual evidence and authorial interpretation, which I think she was a little ambiguous about when she came in. The "can-do" attitude, I think, was the most important thing that came from the session. She wasn't as daunted by the task of rewriting her paper because when she left she had a working outline of her paper's organization. She had done all the work of this outline herself. The only thing I did was write down what she said and put bullet points next to the items so that instead of seeming like a big convoluted question, it was a handful of straightforward questions.