You may remember high school when your teacher would unearth (from deep inside the belly of some ancient filing cabinet) that musty old list of suggested writing topics. You’ve seen it, photocopied so many times that it’s barely legible anymore. A page full of clichéd “pro-and-con” topic ideas, such as capital punishment, euthanasia, gun control, the military draft, abortion, the drinking age … and on and on.
In college you will never see this list again. Good riddance! From now on, you will think of and develop your own writing topics. But with freedom comes responsibility. Without the crutch of a teacher-approved topics list, you’ll be forced to think for yourself. This makes it seem like you’re all on your own, but you do have some resources, such as...
Your own topics list. Take out a piece of paper (or open an electronic document) labeled “Topics List” every time you are reading, participating in class discussion, or listening to a lecture in any class, not just English. Whenever a statement you’ve read or heard (or said) strikes you as interesting, jot it down on your list. Do it right away; don’t wait because you’ll forget about it later. Don’t censor yourself at this stage. Even if an item sounds ridiculous now, later on (perhaps when combined with another, ostensibly unrelated idea), it might turn out to be profound. Don’t worry about “stealing” another student’s idea in a class discussion. Their idea will prompt you to think of a related, but different, idea all your own. If the idea is a professor’s from a lecture, however, that idea is the professor’s intellectual property, so be sure to get his/her permission to use it and cite it properly. Remember, your topic idea must transcend what you’ve read or heard so that it becomes your own original idea.
It pays off in the end to spend extra time and front-load your effort in topic selection. Choosing a topic that interests and inspires you will make the writing process much easier and will aid you in writing a more engaging paper. This is especially true if you continue on to graduate school and must write an 80-page master’s thesis or a 300-page doctoral dissertation. With a work so lengthy, you’ll likely be sick of that topic by the end of the researching, drafting and revising process even if it interested you at the beginning. So if the topic didn’t interest you at the outset, then stand by for excruciating tedium.
Once you have chosen a topic, you’ll need to engage in a process to narrow your broad topic idea down to a focused, specific thesis statement. But that’s, as they say, a topic for another day…
© 2014 Bob Dial. All rights reserved.
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