This semester I'm going to ask you to develop four
good
ideas. One of our goals is NOT to avoid the writer's most
difficult
task, which is thinking of something to say. If I give you
subjects
like "My Three Favorite Restaurants in Corpus Christi," I'd make this
job
easier for everybody. Papers like this are easy to write and
easy
to grade.
But usually they don't challenge you to say anything
of
much significance. What we'd like to do in this class is to go
through
the hard work of actually creating the substance of what you're going
to
say. Often, your idea will evolve as you write, so that what your
latest draft says may not at all resemble what your first draft
said.
But
the goal is to produce something that has real value for the audience,
something that will interest, provoke, persuade.
Now where do you find good ideas? I find a lot of the ideas that
I write about in the newspaper, a source that tells us what's going on
in our community and the world. I often
find things in the paper that I think need a response of some sort, and
the response that I produce is an idea in its own right.
Sometimes I go to lectures or seminars and find things that I think
need to be written about. Often I find ideas by just looking at
what's going on around me. In short, one way to have ideas is to
encounter other ideas.
This may sound pretty challenging, but we'll all be working on this
together. Having good ideas and writing about them is what this
course is about.
We'll work according to deadlines, that is, you'll have
Idea 1, for example, posted on your webpage by a certain date.
But you can also work on all four of your ideas as you see fit.
As you have ideas, you'll post them, and as you draft you'll post
those, as well. And we won't necessarily
completely finish
with one idea before we start another. And we'll sometimes go
back
to an idea that we left several weeks earlier. But the ultimate
goal
is to develop your thinking on four good ideas and to be able to write
well--in class--about each of them.
If you have trouble finding ideas, look at the ideas that other people
are working on or that I'm working on. Talk to your
colleagues. Talk to me. The first question I'll ask you,
though, will be: "Have you looked in the newspaper?"
As you come across subjects, remember the essential question: It
isn't "Is this a good idea?" It's "Do I have something to say
about it?"
We're going to express each of these ideas with drafts that fall into a
very precise window in terms of word count: You'll always write
between 386 and 434 words. Be very precise with the word count.
Finally, here are some subject to avoid, either because they've been
worn out or they have some other difficulty that makes them very hard
to write about:
Abortion
Childhood obesity
Street racing
Most subjects having to do with religion
Bad streets in Corpus Christi