Monday, March 31, 2014

My Momma's Wisdom

Like I've said before, I still need to come up with a specific thesis. However, I still have a strong desire to write about the role of language in The Phantom Tollbooth. I recently brainstormed by creating a list of Things That Language Does that I feel would be applicable to my analysis of the book.

First I'm going to sit down and write out as much of the paper as I can (working on the goal of 4 to 5 pages from the middle of the essay). As I go, I hope to get an idea of what kind of research I would need to do: definitions, analyses done by my fellow students (such as  Kimberlee), and so forth. I don't feel it would be wise to do research until I actually know what I'm looking for. In other words, panicking and thinking "Oh crap, this is a RESEARCH paper so I need to do RESEARCH!" and wantonly scrambling around the Humanities Reference section of the library without any clear goal is not going to be productive.

My mom once said: "People are scared of commitment until they're committed." So I just need to get started and have some faith in myself.

1 comment:

  1. Your mother's wisdom applies to papers as much as to personal relationships: if you commit yourself to a set of ideas, the commitment returns positive benefits (read: clarity and personal engagement). I don't want to push the analogy too far, since ideas or scholarship are not people. However, think of the anxiety that people go through when serial dating for a long time. Get married (or at least engaged) to your topic ASAP and watch the calm (and the fun) begin.

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