Final Paper Topics
To be honest I have no idea what I am going to write my final paper about. I have been busy trying to come up with paper topics for my other two classes and trying to put together a halfway decent presentation for RMMLA.
However, several topics have piqued my interest. One such topic is intellectual property, especially in the new age of Twitter and blogging. Another one is a rubric for what makes good writing. Looking at sentence level errors versus paragraph and larger errors. Can we quantify good writing? Or is it like pornography, we know it when we see it?
I do think that this paper will pose more of a challenge than the other papers I will write this semester. It is going to be hard to do a bunch of research and just write it down rather than arguing a point and using research to back it up. I am much more comfortable in the second vein of writing. The first vein feels more like research for a presentation.
For example, over the summer a took a history of language and literary texts course and I had to present the current ideas about the origins of the languages we all speak or the history of the Indo-European languages. The experts fell into three distinct camps, one believing we came from Turkey, one believing we came from the Asian steppes and the genetic camp who was still unsure as to our origins, except that at some point back we all came from Africa. I explained the holes in the theories, like how Basque exists and yet matches no other languages, but it was a fifteen to twenty minute presentation with a single page handout. That is easy. But putting together a long paper with just information I don't think will be as easy. This is my concern. If I had to write a paper on the subject, I probably would have sided with one of the camps and then presented evidence that supported that. "Just the facts ma'am" kind of confounds me. Perhaps it is because most of the writing that I have been doing up to this point is the argumentative kind.
Is anyone else worried, or just me? I'll be okay because I have to be, but that does not mean I won't panic and freak out before hand.
I also have to say that at RMMLA I heard an interesting paper saying that many of the social conventions and restrictions that are put upon us by society and internalized (the Foucauldian panopticon) have turned many of us into zombies. Is this perhaps what the rigid schooling has lead us to? Is this why we have such a fascination for zombies? Why Zombieland is number one at the box office right now? Do you think that our grading system and our teaching of centuries old texts has created a nation of zombies? Food for thought (pun intended).
At the end of the day, my paper will most likely be guided by what all my papers are guided by -- my research. I find that only after reading a bunch of other peoples' stuff do I actually come up with anything to say. I'm hoping that this applies for this paper as well.
However, several topics have piqued my interest. One such topic is intellectual property, especially in the new age of Twitter and blogging. Another one is a rubric for what makes good writing. Looking at sentence level errors versus paragraph and larger errors. Can we quantify good writing? Or is it like pornography, we know it when we see it?
I do think that this paper will pose more of a challenge than the other papers I will write this semester. It is going to be hard to do a bunch of research and just write it down rather than arguing a point and using research to back it up. I am much more comfortable in the second vein of writing. The first vein feels more like research for a presentation.
For example, over the summer a took a history of language and literary texts course and I had to present the current ideas about the origins of the languages we all speak or the history of the Indo-European languages. The experts fell into three distinct camps, one believing we came from Turkey, one believing we came from the Asian steppes and the genetic camp who was still unsure as to our origins, except that at some point back we all came from Africa. I explained the holes in the theories, like how Basque exists and yet matches no other languages, but it was a fifteen to twenty minute presentation with a single page handout. That is easy. But putting together a long paper with just information I don't think will be as easy. This is my concern. If I had to write a paper on the subject, I probably would have sided with one of the camps and then presented evidence that supported that. "Just the facts ma'am" kind of confounds me. Perhaps it is because most of the writing that I have been doing up to this point is the argumentative kind.
Is anyone else worried, or just me? I'll be okay because I have to be, but that does not mean I won't panic and freak out before hand.
I also have to say that at RMMLA I heard an interesting paper saying that many of the social conventions and restrictions that are put upon us by society and internalized (the Foucauldian panopticon) have turned many of us into zombies. Is this perhaps what the rigid schooling has lead us to? Is this why we have such a fascination for zombies? Why Zombieland is number one at the box office right now? Do you think that our grading system and our teaching of centuries old texts has created a nation of zombies? Food for thought (pun intended).
At the end of the day, my paper will most likely be guided by what all my papers are guided by -- my research. I find that only after reading a bunch of other peoples' stuff do I actually come up with anything to say. I'm hoping that this applies for this paper as well.
Labels: finals, paper topics
posted by Unknown at 9:33 AM
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