Secrets to Writing Great Papers

STEP 2. Tackle the Topic

STEP 2 Tackle the Topic You can't get ideas unless you know what to think about. In school, the "what to think about" is generally called the topic. Topics don't contain verbs. They are nouns or groups of nouns, sometimes interspersed with pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions. A topic can be very general: • South Carolina • Mars • highways • hydrocarbons Or it can be excruciatingly specific: • the Apple model III computer's bookkeeping programs • photos of Mars compared to computer-projected simulations of Mars 6 Tackle the Topic 7 • the word "I" in James Joyce's Ulysses • carbon tetrachloride poisoning among children The fate of a paper is very often decided by its choice of topic. A run-of-the-mill topic earns run-of-the-mill grades, while a sexy topic makes the grader sit up and take notice. A topic that the grader likes seems more important, even if it's not, than one that the grader doesn't like. Biting off too big a topic can destroy a short paper by making it seem superficial or sketchy, and choosing too obvious a topic can be misconstrued ..as trying to avoid work. So it's important to take time choosing the right topic. 2ND PROBLEM: How to recognize an idea SOLUTION: Compare it with fact Before you can write about an idea, you must be able to recognize one. It's easier than you think. If a statement is not·a fact, it's an idea. A fact has been proven. An idea hasn't. Many of the things we now know are fact were once ideas: • that the earth is round • that the stars move • that some mushrooms are poisonous • that space is curved Some ideas are so new that nobody's proven or disproven them yet: • that porpoises mayor may not be geniuses • that vitamin C mayor may not prevent colds Some ideas that have been around a long time still haven't become fact: • that time travel mayor may not be possible 8      • that utopian society mayor may not be achievable • that cancer mayor may not be curable An idea becomes a fact when most of the people qualified to judge it believe it. Until then, it's only opinion. To get the judges to accept an idea as fact, the originator of the idea offers what he thinks is convincing evidence. This evidence is what's at the heart of most papers. What you're trying to prove or convince others of in your paper is the idea. This is true of all factual papers. In fiction, however, you don't attempt to prove ideas but to demonstrate what you mean by them. Your demonstration is done by making the ideas come alive by cloaking them in a story. Most ideas come to people as the result of something: of experience, of investigation, of reading or seeing or hearing. Even ideas that seem to come from nowhere (the EUREKA! kind) actually come from unconsciously building on something that's been seen or read or experienced. We can't give you ideas you've never had; if we did you wouldn't understand them. But we can show you where to look for ideas and how to build on what you know. That's the purpose of this book. 3RD PROBLEM: Teacher assigns too broad a topic SOLUTION: Select an aspect of the topic If the topic you're assigned is too general, you'll waste a great deal of research time collecting much more data than you can fit into a class paper. Then you'll spend hours deciding what to put in and what to leave out. You can't ever write a good paragraph on a broad topic, and even trying to write a short paper is more difficult and time-eonsuming if the topic is too big for it. If a topic sounds like it could fill a book, you can assume right from the start that it's too general for any paper of less than 10,000 words. Look back at the general topics and Tackling the Topic 9 you'll see what we mean. If you choose too specific a topic, you won't have enough to write about, but for now it's better to err on the side of being specific. When you get to outlining your paper, you can broaden the topic quite easily...