Welcome back! It’s me again, your resident IF student-blogger. I hope you all had an amazing spring break… and if not, no worries, only 36 more days until summer vacation. Last week I told you about my plan to write several posts on the common pitfalls of research and how to overcome them, so here’s my next entry. And as always, if I ever write something provoking enough to make you want to respond, just shoot me an email and I’ll try my best to accommodate.
I find that this is so irritating because most of these questions require that you already have an answer to the rest of them. “If I only knew my topic I’d know what style to use,” or “if I just knew what the professor wanted than I’d know what topic to choose.” So where do you begin? Well, here’s my advice:
First off, always try to find out what your professor wants from the assignment. This can sometimes be tricky, so here’s a little trick I like to use… ask them! More often that not, your professor will gladly give you some guidance (and usually some useful advice) on what they expect for the assignment. Just knowing how long it should be, or what students have done in the past can help dictate where your paper should go. If they absolutely refuse to guide you at all, than that should tell you something too - they want to see what you can do, so pick a style and topic you’re comfortable with (maybe something from high school) and use that as your jumping off point. This will eliminate about 90% of the guesswork from your assignment and answers one of your initial questions.
Next, pick a few narrow topics on a subject that interests you and try to come up with a single thesis that encompasses all of them. This way, if you end up writing a lot on any one topic, you can just tweak your thesis and cut out one of the others from your essay completely. Conversely, if you find yourself running out of things to say, you can always insert a new, related topic into your thesis and add another entire section to your paper. Just be careful to work each section so that the whole paper has a constant rhythm and flow, otherwise it will sound staccato and feel disjointed.
Finally, it sometimes pays to just start writing. If you can get the momentum rolling and the juices flowing, you will overcome the initial hurdle without even trying. And don’t worry if your thesis changes ten times in the first ten minutes of writing, each time you alter your paper you’re getting one step closer to the final product. Just keep going, and sooner or later you’ll find that you have several good ideas for the narrow topics that can make up your final thesis.
Ok-ok, here’s a quick summary on how to get started:
• To figure out what you’re being asked to do, try asking whoever assigned you the project. They know better than anyone else what it is they want.
• Choose several related ‘sub-topics’ to make up your thesis. This way, you can just add or subtract topics depending on where your paper (or research) leads you.
• When in doubt, simply start writing. After a while filter out the ‘bad stuff’ and you’ll end up with a page full of good ideas. Pick the best ones and run with ‘em. Before you know it, you’ll have the beginnings of an excellent paper.
• Don’t be afraid to go off on a tangent, some of the best ideas come from the merger of seemingly unrelated topics. Just be sure find the connection that makes it all work together in the end.
Jovially yours,
~R.S.
