There will come a time when you'll be sitting in class, glancing over your syllabus and you stumble across two dreaded words: RESEARCH. PAPER. The chill will run up your spine, your heart rate will increase, palms get sweaty (something something Mom's spaghetti) as your brain races through everything and anything it can find about the course you're currently enrolled in. Sucks for you if you're in an extremely obscure course like...macrame in the early 20th century or the history of Stalin's ROCKING mustache.
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| Calm your babushkas, mustache rides are 27 rubles |
Take a deep breath and let's get down to business (1000 brownie points if you finished that sentence with "to defeat the Huns!") What is your course about? Is there a set time frame your professor has in mind for the subject they're discussing? Are there any major aspects of your course that instantly come to mind? These are some of the questions you can ask yourself when trying to narrow down an idea for a paper.
Let's take the example of the Civil War. I took a course on this last semester with a professor I will refer to as Safety Dance for the remainder of this post and blog. Safety Dance had a required historiographical essay (if your brain just exploded at that word 'historiographical', sit tight; there will be a post later on about the different types of essays and papers one might write) on an aspect of the era, which included the Antebellum period.
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| Wrong Antebellum |
For me personally, my brain rebels at the thought of studying battles. I like learning about them and their significance, like Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, but diving head first into battle strategies, formations, and the leaders makes me want to bang my head against a desk. I would much rather look at things that most classes glance over briefly before moving onto the next battle; things like the establishment of the undertaker business, politics of war, the things that happened in between battles (another future post). But don't let my personal biases turn you off of your hypothetical research paper. Perhaps you decide you want to research a specific battle. For shits and giggles, we'll go with Antietam.
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| Oh yea, this is gonna be good |
Here's when things get a little tricky. Talking about the entirety of a battle can be a little...tedious. If you haven't already deduced this, battles are extensive. A lot of stuff happens in a very short period of time. Instead of researching each day of the battle, maybe try looking a specific day. The battle of Gettysburg lasted three days, but each day had an impact on the outcome. (For further reading on the battle of Gettysburg, if that's your historical jam, check out Michael Shaara's novel Killer Angels. It's a pretty interesting read.) If Pickett's charge had been decided on a day earlier, the Confederates would most likely have gained an even larger upper hand over the Union and totally decimate them the next day. But alas and woe to General Lee and to the glee and relief of Grant, Longstreet took the blame for the ill-timed and ill-prepared charge and the Union came out the victor.
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| We're going facial hair heavy on this post today |
Alright, back to your research topic. Antietam. You soon discover as you scroll through the Wikipedia entry (calm down, calm down...Wikipedia is okay to use! Don't believe me? Wait for a future post...) that it was the single bloodiest battle of the Civil War and the first one on Union soil. But wait, what's that? Something has caught your eye. What in the devil could Burnside Bridge be about? WHAM BAM, THANK YOU MA'AM! We've discovered your research paper!
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| Burnside in all his glory |
If you're intrigued about those glorious mutton chops that handsome chap is sporting, be ready to be tickled pink. That's Ambrose Burnside, who was a general in the Union army. But Meghan, you ask...his last name sounds oddly familiar. If you're a male (or a particularly unfortunate female), you know all about the world of sideburns. And we can thank this man and his exquisite facial hair sculpting abilities for that. Burnside had some rocking sideburns. With that awesome fact aside, we'll try to tear our eyes off that spectacular image of facial hair and continue on.
I am going to use the fictional Fast-Forward button on this fictional research paper and zoom us about, oh, a month into your research. You've been surfing through Civil War websites, getting up close and personal with the stacks in the library. You may have dedicated a specific notebook or binder to keep your notes in. That's fantastic. But why do you have such a dead look in your eyes? Is it because you physically can't take learning about your subject anymore? Welcome to the wonderful, wonderful world of history papers. You will reach this state and feel like you will never, ever recover. Close your eyes and breathe deeply, my young grasshoppers. All will be well.
You might also have been toying with the idea of switching topics. You see another part of the Civil War that intrigues you and it beckons you like a starving man to a sandwich. For the love of everything holy, do NOT switch topics at this point in time. There can be exceptions to this, like a professor (who knows what they're talking about) guiding you in a different direction or narrowing down a topic so much that you've hit a dead end and there is no way out. Believe you me, everything will sound better than the topic you're working on.
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| Also, don't make things up to make your topic more interesting |
This is a huge problem for me when I work on papers. I try to find every single thing that has nothing to do with my topic and try to form a coherent thesis or even a simple research question around them. And weird...nothing seems to work. Don't stress out. Don't get angry (an odd emotion to be experiencing while researching, but next to interest, that's all I ever feel nowadays). I've developed a system of sorts that helps me recover from this period of research.
- Take a break. Yea, yea, the paper is due in a month and a half, but you deserve a brain-break. Watch a mindless TV show for a bit. Read a magazine. Facebook creep the crap out of the friends you've been neglecting while you've been fantasizing about stroking Burnside's sideburns.
- Talk to someone who knows jack-squat about your subject. For the last month, you've been mumbling to yourself like a mental patient about Burnside Bridge. Of course it's no longer appealing to you. But explaining it to someone else will more or less renew your interest, as you might find yourself reworking a concept that has been plaguing you for a while.
- Look into the macro view of your subject. See how this affected other decisions. Reminding yourself of why you became interested in it in the first place helps a lot.
- Find out when your professor has office hours and go and talk to them. They wouldn't be teaching the class if they didn't know how to help you out. I practically lived in a professor's office one semester. I'm convinced that I was the reason she decided to go work in Germany for a year...
- Have a bitch-fest with other students in your class. Vent your frustrations out to people who are going through the same level of hell as you are. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it really works for me. I'll be grouching about a topic and all of a sudden, with startling clarity, everything will make sense. And getting a different perspective from other students is super helpful.
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| This will be like Manna from Heaven to you. Do not be seduced by its tempting New Releases! |
Writing your research paper is another post in it of itself, so I won't really touch base on that.
Safety Dance heard my complaints and interesting facts at the end of almost every class last semester. I was working on the subject of the trial of Mary Surratt and whether or not historians all agreed that her subsequent death could be considered judicial murder. I still get Hulk-like anger pangs whenever Lincoln's assassination trial is brought up, but that's residual hatred seeping to the surface. Now I can focus my attention to the history of biographies on Andrew Jackson. I can feel myself slipping into dead-eye syndrome as I write this (the biography I'm reading is literally glaring at me from my desk; I can feel it judging me from across the room). But I'll take my own advice into account and go bug someone relentlessly about the life and times of Andrew Jackson (read: I'll be calling my mom and droning on about Jackson as she absentmindedly plays Bookworm on her iPad...)
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| Surprisingly, no. No I don't. |
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