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what should my thesis topic be?
Mar. 21st, 2016 05:19 pm When Umberto Eco died a while back, there were the expected mentions of "The Name of the Rose," but I learned that before he became famous as a novelist, he wrote an instruction book called "How to Write a Thesis." I requested it from the library, and read most of it on the T, as casual reading.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23461426-how-to-write-a-thesis
In Italy in the 1970s, when he wrote the first edition, all undergraduate university degrees included a thesis of some sort. I guess there wasn't a required composition class (I was going to write "English Composition," but they would have been writing in Italian). The introduction to the recent English translation acknowledges the existance of the web, but people feel that there is value in seeing his whole index card system, read the parts about going to libraries to start your bibliography, and so forth. I remember doing the index card stuff in 1973 for the term paper we had to write to graduate from high school in NC at the time (what seemed remarkably unfair was that while the law required this as a graduation requirement, there was no length specified. In our "college prep" track, the paper was twenty pages. For some people, I think it was five. They still had to learn all the now-obsolete footnote conventions and stuff, though). What I don't remember about my paper (about the Egyptian book of the Dead. I still come across index cards from time to time) was having any kind of thesis statement at all - it was more like "all about this thing that I learned" rather than any synthesis, as far as I recall from forty-plus years onward. The other interesting lesson about length - the older brother of one of my friends wrote ninety pages,instead of twenty, for the same teacher. She stopped grading at page twenty. He did graduate, so he must have passed, but it was a lesson to us all about following directions.
Eco's section about clear writing and sentence length (and structure) should be put out as a little pamplhet all on its own, and discreetly placed on shelves where "Elements of Style" formerly sat.
Now that I have read this book, I started thinking of writing a thesis. There are lots of things I'd like to learn, but I don't really have a topic, or any way for someone to read it and grade it. I guess I could get Arthur to do that. He does it professionally, after all. I'm a registered user of An Archive of Our Own, but I don't guess a random thesis would fit in with all that fan fiction (I have one of those in mind, too, with nothing written down. I ponder it in the bath sometimes).
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23461426-how-to-write-a-thesis
In Italy in the 1970s, when he wrote the first edition, all undergraduate university degrees included a thesis of some sort. I guess there wasn't a required composition class (I was going to write "English Composition," but they would have been writing in Italian). The introduction to the recent English translation acknowledges the existance of the web, but people feel that there is value in seeing his whole index card system, read the parts about going to libraries to start your bibliography, and so forth. I remember doing the index card stuff in 1973 for the term paper we had to write to graduate from high school in NC at the time (what seemed remarkably unfair was that while the law required this as a graduation requirement, there was no length specified. In our "college prep" track, the paper was twenty pages. For some people, I think it was five. They still had to learn all the now-obsolete footnote conventions and stuff, though). What I don't remember about my paper (about the Egyptian book of the Dead. I still come across index cards from time to time) was having any kind of thesis statement at all - it was more like "all about this thing that I learned" rather than any synthesis, as far as I recall from forty-plus years onward. The other interesting lesson about length - the older brother of one of my friends wrote ninety pages,instead of twenty, for the same teacher. She stopped grading at page twenty. He did graduate, so he must have passed, but it was a lesson to us all about following directions.
Eco's section about clear writing and sentence length (and structure) should be put out as a little pamplhet all on its own, and discreetly placed on shelves where "Elements of Style" formerly sat.
Now that I have read this book, I started thinking of writing a thesis. There are lots of things I'd like to learn, but I don't really have a topic, or any way for someone to read it and grade it. I guess I could get Arthur to do that. He does it professionally, after all. I'm a registered user of An Archive of Our Own, but I don't guess a random thesis would fit in with all that fan fiction (I have one of those in mind, too, with nothing written down. I ponder it in the bath sometimes).
