Requesting a 1500-word essay on situation and policy for freshman year

In what direction are you going to write your paper on situation and policy? Has the topic selection teacher passed the review? Is there an outline for the teacher to look at the writing direction?

Has the teacher told you which direction is better for writing the paper? Before writing a paper, you must write an outline so that the teacher can determine the framework and avoid major changes during the revision process of the paper in the future! !

Pay attention to the school’s formatting requirements and writing standards, otherwise it is likely to be sent back for revision. If you still don’t understand or understand anything, you can ask me. I hope you can graduate smoothly and move towards a new life. .

1. Should the paper be on a single topic or comprehensive?

The first temptation that college students encounter is to write a lot of things in their papers. For example, if a student is interested in literature, his first thought is to give his paper a title like "Today's Literature." If he had to narrow down the scope, he would choose "Spanish Literature from the Postwar Period to the 1970s."

This type of paper is very dangerous. It's the kind of question that would leave even more mature researchers scratching their heads. This is an impossible challenge for a college student in his 20s. It will either become a mere list of names and prevailing views, or it will be a biased reference to the original material (often due to the omission of things that should not be omitted). In 1961, the contemporary writer Gonzalo Torante Barreste wrote "Aspects of Contemporary Spanish Literature" (Guaderrama Edition). However, if this was a doctoral thesis, people would definitely regard it as It's awesome, even though it's hundreds of pages thick. It has been accused of omission or ignorance in not mentioning the names of some people considered very important, or that he sometimes devotes an entire chapter to some "not so good" writers and to some people considered "important" "Only a few strokes were given. Of course, we know that the author's historical knowledge and critical ability are recognized, so these omissions or imbalances are intentional. It is more effective to avoid talking about a certain character than to write a whole page about him. Explain the problem. But if the same thing happens to a 22-year-old college student, who can guarantee that there is no ulterior motive behind his silence? Or is he avoiding it because he would spend several pages discussing it elsewhere? Or does this author know how to write?

Students who write this kind of paper often complain to the members of the review committee that they do not understand what they mean, but those members actually "cannot" understand what he means, so a comprehensive paper Often seen as a sign of arrogance. This does not mean that the academic arrogance (reflected in the paper) must be denied. We can even say that Dante is a bad poet, but we must first write at least 300 pages to conduct an in-depth analysis of Dante's text. We can say it later. And these cannot be seen in a comprehensive paper. Because of this, for a college student, instead of writing about "Spanish Literature from the Postwar to the 1970s", it is better to choose a more practical and low-key topic.

I can tell you directly what a good title is. It is not "Aldecoa's Novel", but "Two Different Versions of "Birds of Paradise"". Doesn’t it sound a bit boring? Maybe, but that would be a more interesting challenge.

As long as you think about it carefully, you will see that in the final analysis this is a question of how to please. If a student were to write a comprehensive thesis on forty years of literature, the student would face every possible objection. If a proposer or review committee member happens to want to claim that he or she knows a lesser-known author, how will the student respond if he or she fails to include that author in the paper? As long as each member of the review committee finds three people who have not been mentioned when looking at the table of contents, the student will turn pale from a violent bombardment, and his paper will suddenly look like a pile of bullshit. On the contrary, if the student carefully chooses a topic with a narrow scope, he only needs to firmly grasp a material that is unknown to most members of the review committee. I'm not peddling some dirty tricks, it's a trick, but it's not dirty, and it works. As long as the degree applicant appears as an "expert" in front of the public who are less professional than him, and it can be seen that he has put in a lot of effort to become an expert, there is nothing wrong with taking advantage of him.

Between these two extremes (that is, a comprehensive essay on forty years of literary history and a strict single-topic essay on the distinction between two texts) there are many intermediate forms. For example, we could write about "The Experience of the Avant-Garde Literary Writers of the Forties" or "The Literary Treatment of Geography by Juan Bennett and Sánchez Ferrosio" or even "Carlos Edmundo de Ori, Eduardo Chicharo and Gloria Fuertes: similarities and differences among three post-island poets.

Let's look at a passage from a pamphlet. Although it is in the field of science, the advice it gives applies to all disciplines:

For example, " The topic "Geology" is too broad. "Volcanology" is a branch of geology, but it is too big. "Volcanoes of Mexico" is a good place to start, but it also doesn't go far enough.

Narrowing the scope a little may lead to a very valuable study: "The History of Popocalepeil Volcano" (one of Cortes's conquistadors may have climbed there in 1591, It did not erupt violently until 1702). A title with a smaller scope and fewer years is "The Birth and Death of Palikudin Volcano" (its life only lasted from February 20, 1943 to March 4, 1952).

Okay, I still recommend the last question. Because at this point, as long as the applicant can tell everything about that unfortunate volcano, it will be fine.

A long time ago, a student came to me and told me that he wanted to write a paper entitled "Symbols in Contemporary Thought." Such a paper is impossible. Even I don't know what "symbol" refers to. In fact, this word has different meanings in different authors. Sometimes, two authors will use it to express two things with completely opposite meanings. We only need to consider "symbols" as understood by formal logicians or mathematicians. They are meaningless things that occupy a specific position in a calculation formula and have a specific function (such as a, b, x, y in an algebraic formula). other authors may regard them as full of ambiguous meanings, such as those images that appear in dreams, which may refer to a tree, or sexual organs, or the desire to grow up, etc. So, how can we make this a paper title? We must analyze all the theories about signs in contemporary culture, list their similarities and differences, look for the basic single concept shared by all authors and theories in their differences, and see how these differences Are the different theories incompatible? No contemporary philosopher, linguist or psychoanalyst can satisfactorily address this question. A fledgling college student, even if he is precocious, has only received at most six or seven years of adult education. How can he complete such research? At best, he's as biased as Tolant Barres. Or he will put forward his own theory about symbols and put aside what his predecessors have said. We will talk about the questionable aspects of this approach in the next section. I talked to this student for a while and I suggested that he could write about Freudian and Jungian symbols and that he needed to forget about various other views and concentrate on the two authors above. It is a pity that this student does not know German (we will talk about language issues in Section 5). Finally we decided to give the title "The Symbolic Concept of Peirce, Frye and Jung". The paper will discuss these three different authors who are philosophers, critics and psychoanalysts. Three of them are expressed by the same word. of different concepts. Because they use the same word, confusion often arises, and ideas from one are often attributed to the other. At the end of the article, as a conclusion to the hypothesis, the student attempts to find a balance between these synonymous concepts and find their similarities. He also mentioned some other authors he knew, but said that he could not elaborate more on them due to the length of the paper. In this way, although his paper only mentions authors X, Y, and Z, no one can accuse him of not considering author K. No one can accuse him of not being sufficiently detailed about the other authors cited, since that is mentioned in passing at the end of the paper, and the main body of the paper is the three authors mentioned in the title.

Now we see that a paper does not have to stick to a single topic, and a comprehensive paper can also be well-formed and accepted by everyone.

It should be noted that the word "single" means much more than what we use here. A single paper deals with only one topic, as opposed to a "history of XXX" or a handbook or an encyclopedia. In this sense, "Theme of the "Inverted World" of Medieval Writers" should also be a single theme. It involves many writers, but all revolve around a specific theme (from the hypotheticals they imagined to the examples, paradoxes and fables given, such as fish flying in the sky, birds swimming in the water, gods and horses). This seems like an ideal single theme. But in fact, in order to write such a paper, we need to discuss all the authors related to this topic, especially the unknown authors who have not been recognized. Therefore, this topic still has to be classified as a "comprehensive paper with a single topic". It is difficult to write and requires the preparation of countless materials. If someone must write it, I suggest changing the title to "The Theme of the "Inverted World" of the Carolingian Poets". Once the scope is narrowed, we will know where to look and where not to look for materials.

Of course, a comprehensive paper is more exciting to write. After all, it seems boring to spend one or two years or even longer studying a writer. But we need to understand that writing a strictly single-topic paper does not mean that it cannot be comprehensive in perspective. Writing a paper about Aldecoa's novels requires us to have a deep understanding of Spanish realism. We also need to read Sánchez Fierrocio or García Oltrarno, and we need to study Aldecoa. American novels and classical literature. Only by placing the author in the panoramic view can we understand and interpret him. But using a panorama as a background and painting a picture of the panorama are two different things.

The former only painted a portrait of a knight with a field and a river as the background, while the latter had to paint many fields, valleys and rivers. We have to change the technique, or in photographic terms, the focal length. Panoramic views taken from a single author's perspective are somewhat out of focus, incomplete and inferior.

Finally, we must remember the following basic conclusion: the smaller the scope, the more worry-free and secure the work will be. Since a single topic is comprehensive, the paper looks best like an essay rather than a history or encyclopedia.