EXPLORING YOUR TOPIC
The strategies listed below are all ways to help you generate ideas. Try them out and see which works best for you. Do not worry about coming up with the perfect topic right away; the process of generating ideas can help you think about different aspects and implications of the topic you finally choose, and you may end up using facets of other ideas in your writing.
Freewriting
The quickest, easiest, and most direct way to fill up an empty piece of paper or blank computer screen is just to start writing. Freewriting is an unconstrained writing exercise in which you simply write down whatever comes to your mind for a set period. The only rule is that you cannot stop writing. A freewriting exercise is designed to tap into the subconscious mind and pull out ideas that may be lurking beneath the surface. To complete such an exercise successfully, you need to override your mind's "editing function" and just write.
Here is a brief example of a freewriting session in response to an assignment to compare the view of liberal education in John Henry Newman's "Knowledge Its Own End" with that in Seneca's "On Liberal and Vocational Studies."
OK, so I'm supposed to compare what John Henry Newman and Seneca said about education. Both of them talk a lot about liberal education and how it is not supposed to be useful for anything other than itself. When you read them, they sound a lot alike in this way, which is kind of weird since one of them lived in ancient Rome and the other one lived in England like a hundred years ago. Come to think of it, this is probably the biggest difference between them. Seneca lived in a very different kind of society than Newman lived in. Rome was an empire where people owned slaves and were divided into very distinct classes. Newman lived in an industrial country that was pretty much a democracy, at least at the end of his life. Maybe this is why Seneca thought that useful education was a bad thing, and only liberal education was worthwhile, while Newman just thought that they were different things. Most people in Newman's day couldn't afford not to think about how they would earn a living. I guess that's still true today.
This freewriting demonstration follows the usual pattern for such an exercise: it begins with a self-reflective discussion (here I am, doing what I am supposed to be doing), moves to some fairly surface observations about the texts (that both Seneca and Newman talk about liberal education) and then to a statement that, with a lot more refining, could be the basis of a very strong comparison paper: that Newman is more tolerant of practical education than Seneca because Newman lived in a democratic society.
Clustering
Clustering is a good strategy for processing information visually. It consists of drawing some kind of picture that represents the ideas that you are discussing and using that picture to show the relationship between a central, general idea and several more-focused, subordinate ideas. The easiest way to do this is with circles and lines, as in the following diagram, which responds to an assignment to "write a paper that uses Martin Luther King Jr.'s three categories of 'unjust law' to argue that a current law or type of law is unjust."
The goal of clustering here is to think of a current law that meets Martin Luther King Jr.'s classification of an unjust law, one that can then be the focus of the essay. Starting simply with "unjust laws," the writer branches out to come up with more- specific kinds of unjust laws. One kind of law, "laws that make people give up their rights," leads the writer to think about different rights, which then leads to the final essay topic: "eminent domain laws," which require people to give up their right to property. In clustering, every idea allows you to jot down several more ideas that are connected to it, so you can continue to refine and develop ideas with increasing layers of specificity. Once you reach an idea that seems workable, you can take it from your cluster and refine it further into an argumentative thesis statement.
Brainstorming
Like freewriting and clustering, brainstorming exercises are meant to get a lot of ideas down on paper without worrying—at least during the exercise—whether they
will work for your essay. A brainstorming session can be done alone or in a group, but the ground rules are the same: write down every idea that comes to you, do not try to evaluate the ideas as they come, do not worry about writing complete sentences, and move to the next idea quickly.
Now, imagine staying with the assignment to apply Martin Luther King Jr.'s criteria for unjust laws to a contemporary law and, instead of clustering different kinds of unjust laws, simply throwing out as many ideas as possible. A ten-minute brainstorming session might produce a list like this:
Slavery
Segregation laws
Laws against same-sex marriage
Laws that give police officers the right to collect information
Affirmative action laws that treat minorities differently than others
Prohibition
Laws that keep women from voting
Laws that allow countries to attack other countries
Laws that make it illegal to practice your religion
Laws against drugs
Laws that won't let you drink when you are eighteen while others let you be drafted into the army
Laws that make you wear a helmet or a seat belt
Laws that don't let you go to the college you want to go to
Eminent domain laws that allow governments to seize your property
Laws that don't allow you to defend your house if someone breaks in
Laws that treat rich people differently than poor people
Laws that make people homeless
Laws against people marrying people of other races
Not all the laws on this brainstormed list are suitable for the assignment; some are not current or are not current in the United States, and some are too broad or ill-defined. But a third of these would work very well for the assignment with little or no modification. None of these ideas are thesis statements yet, but they are reasonably good examples of laws that fit the assignment and lend themselves well to good thesis statements and credible essays.
ACHIEVING SUBTLETY
Good writing goes beyond surface issues to explore the deeper meanings and implications of a topic. An argument or idea that digs beneath the surface, that goes beyond the obvious, might be usefully described as "subtle." In a college class, subtle ideas demonstrate to a teacher that you have really thought about an issue, struggled with its complexities, and learned something from an assignment. Once you have come up with a writing topic that meets all the specifications of an assignment, you need to develop and refine your topic to make sure it meets those standards of subtlety—to go beyond the obvious arguments, to do more than just say what you believe about a topic, to learn about the topic. This approach turns an acceptable or a good essay topic into a great one.
As you strive for this kind of subtle analysis, keep the following suggestions in mind:
Go beyond your first ideas
The first ideas that will occur to you about a topic will often be the first ideas that occur to everybody else, making the resulting essay "average" by definition. Moreover, the first ideas that occur to you (and everybody else) are rarely very good. Consider an assignment, for example, in which you have been asked to compare the political philosophies of Christine de Pizan and Niccolo Machiavelli. The first thing that someone looking at these two philosophers will notice is that de Pizan is a woman and Machiavelli is a man. From there, many people will conclude that de Pizan's philosophy must be more "feminine" and Machiavelli's more "masculine." The gendered differences between these two authors, however, are by no means the most interesting or significant differences, and they would not lead to the most interesting essay.