1) Give your thought paper a title.
 

2) Start your thought paper out with a hypothesis, a provocative statement which you can support.

3) Get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible.  What does your hypothesis require for it to be persuasive?
 

4) Quote the original source.  Using someone else's words makes your paper sound a lot more convincing.
 

5) Structure your thoughts logically.  In my thought paper I based my argument on the given progression of the primary text.  In order to bring this progression into the foreground, I divided the text into four subsections.  This sort of subdividing can be used to make the text more manageable.  It also can be used to break down your own argument.  In other words, does your hypothesis contain within it smaller ideas that when added together give you the final product, a convincing argument?

6) Close your thought paper with a final concluding sentence.  Try to piece as best as possible your ideas into this one sentence.
 

The Structural Logic of Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto

     Possibly construed as a pastiche of seemingly unrelated fragments, I argue that F.T. Marinetti's "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" from 1909 can be divided into four segments that logically flow into one another.

     Section one of the manifesto serves to illuminate the serendipity involved in Marinetti's discovery of the principles of futurism.  After driving his automobile into a ditch full of industrial sludge, Marinetti pulls himself from the wreckage and soon "felt the white-iron of joy deliciously pass[ing] through [his] heart."  Although the intention behind his reckless joy ride was to "break out of the horrible shell of wisdom," only through his close brush with death was Marinetti capable of experiencing what he then declares in the actual manifesto.  It is this death-defying experience that affords him the chance to finally break free from the limitations of conventional wisdom.  In his eleven-point manifesto Marinetti exalts the very ideas and objects that made his disastrous moment of discovery possible.  Insomnia, speed, courage, danger and modern transportation are not only constitutive for the futurist car crash, but also find their way into the value system (this is particularly the case with points one through five) that Marinetti hopes to cultivate into war, destruction and revolution (points nine through eleven).  This shift in tense from the present to the future in the middle of the manifesto sets the stage for the concluding sections of the piece.  In section three, Marinetti explains the forward-looking impulses of futurism as described toward the end of section two, the manifesto itself, as the only means for solving what he sees as Italy's national identity crisis.  He writes: "we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians.  [...]  We want to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards."  The emphasis on the apocalyptic future in the manifesto, part two, is therefore a response to its ensuing rejection of the lingering past in Italy's present in part three.  The entire manifesto concludes by stressing the importance of the movement's belief in the future.  Prophesizing that futurism's progeny will smash their forefathers, Marinetti suggests that the logic of destructive progression, an idea discovered in the initial car wreck, cannot afford to spare even its creators.  From the shock of the auto accident to the insights into art, technology and destruction, and from the rejection of Italy's past to the acknowledgment of futurism's own transience, these four stations in Marinetti's manifesto are like domino tiles that fall sequentially thanks to the interconnectedness of their individual ideas.