Writing in an Age of Spin, Fall 2009
Let’s be clear: this may be our most challenging assignment of the semester. I am asking you to select a question or a topic that intrigues you as it arises out of your own experience. I want you to pursue it, using your own train of thought supplemented by investigation to take you further towards figuring out what you don’t already know.
Let’s also be clear that this is not the traditional “research paper.” I don’t want you to come up with a thesis before you begin to write. I will not count the number of your footnotes—though you may want to include some. This is a familiar, or personal, essay; therefore, the most important characteristic of your investigation should be that the research serves as an integrated part of your own train of thought about an issue that emerges out of your own experience. Here, you’ll find there is no absolute line drawn between the subjective experience and the objective research; each enhances the other.
So how does this “fit” with the core focus of our course? For me, it fits because I know how deadening the research paper assignment can be, how much it can discourage original, fresh, unspun thought. As soon as we are assigned the dreaded “research paper,” we have to come up with a “thesis”—but we haven’t really thought through or researched the “topic” yet, so we take a stab and then we’re stuck. The rest of our efforts become proving a case for that miserable belabored compound sentence we didn’t really believe in much in the first place but which we had to submit. And so the well-padded thesis statement drives us along a road littered with B.S.. So, no, you will not have to come up with a definitive “thesis statement” at the beginning, in the middle, or even at the end of this essay. However, clearly articulating your essential insight (which may simply be a more refined question) and how you arrived at it will be crucial to this essay.
Let’s start by finding in your experience the source for an interesting question. A question like, “Why Mow?” or “Why are sports-star biographies such eagerly read disappointments?” That’s the first task—to find some genuine question that emerges out of your experience. And then the second task is to set yourself to pursuing it, through writing, and thinking, and yes, inquiring beyond the confines of your own experience.
The key is to begin by figuring out what you want to think about, write about, learn more about. You can freewrite, jot down notes in the form of questions and thoughts and half-thoughts, and talk with others including me. You’ll also pursue written and online sources as you develop the shape and substance of an essay that pursues your key question towards understanding and insight.
Where exactly will you get? That’s really up for grabs and that’s not entirely what counts. What matters is how you account for the process of your thinking, of moving somewhere in your thinking, of coming to insight. But that insight might just be a more developed, more well-informed, question and not an answer at all.