Word: topicalism
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They allowed me to put off doing homework and provided a fun topic to talk about with friends and family...
...going to put all that work into a project, it ought to be a topic you are passionate about.” This oft-repeated piece of advice poses key practical questions about the uses and limits of belief in writing a thesis. What role does belief have in forming hypotheses and persevering through the long phase of research? And at what point do one’s own opinions and passions become a liability? A good thesis writer should be dispassionate and self-critical, but no thesis writer can be apathetic. Faith in one’s self...
...begin with, it takes some abandon to pick a topic and stick with it. There is no way to predict what you will find, but it is a reliable rule that if you put in enough time, you will find something. Paul wrote to the Hebrews that belief was “the evidence of things not seen,” and as a researcher in the bowels of Widener, I have quested after as-of-yet-unseen evidence. Call it persistence, hard-headedness, or belief—but some such quality is vital to the early stages of finding...
...thesis writers find topics that they believe in from the start. Stuart J. Robinson ’06 wrote an award-winning philosophy thesis last year on “interpersonal forgiveness” because, as he told me, he felt that questions about reconciliation were applicable to every person’s life. But overall I am not convinced that topics exist in an hierarchy of relevance or that thesis writers have to begin with a pet topic. Take just about any topic and research it with enough verve, and you will find that eventually you could vouch...
...Which is not to say that his topic is rich ninnies who somehow stumble through confusion to blissful amour. His people are much more ordinary than that. Take Ben for example. He lives in a nest of nerds on the dwindling remains of a long-ago court settlement. They suck on bongs and beer bottles, vaguely plan a website that will direct readers to skin scenes in movies - not knowing, of course, that it's an already overcrowded field - and dream of dreamgirls they lack the social skills to approach in real life. But if their development is arrested, they...