24 – Reflection: asking questions and proposing answers
Thirdly, you do not spend valuable hours towards the end of the
research period hunting desperately through the library in the vain
Micawber-like hope that ‘something will turn up’ to show you how
to write your answer. Finally, there is long-standing psychological
evidence that once you have consciously articulated certain issues
to be worked on, your subconscious mind will beaver away at them
whilst you are doing other things, with the result that every now
and again an answer or an improvement will pop to the surface.
(The philosopher Bertrand Russell prepared himself for these happy
occasions by carrying round a little notebook in which to write these
ideas down.) In this way you save time because your subconscious can
be working on one essay while your conscious attention is engaged
on another.
The steps summarised above we shall now treat in more detail.
2
Choosing a topic
Your choice of a topic on which to write should be governed most
importantly by your own personal interest and ‘prejudice’. Your only
guide in this matter is yourself. Some people think that if you are too
committed to a subject you will write an essay which is too strongly
influenced by your desire to entrench a particular point of view,
irrespective of evidence. This should not worry you, provided that
you draw an important distinction. This is a distinction between your
interest in the subject as being worthy of study and a commitment
to be as detached as you can when you eventually come to analyse
the evidence which supports one or another answer to the question.
The early stages of preparing an essay dealt with in this chapter are
purely private. So choosing a topic, like your first reflections on it,
can be governed by as much self-interest and prejudice as you care to
allow. It would be much more a problem if you find that none of the
topics on a list interests you. If that happens, you should try to work
one out for yourself on some aspect of the course that does interest
you and then gain your tutor’s approval of it.
There are some subsidiary issues which might enter into your
choice of topic, and which might influence you in favouring one over
Thirdly, you do not spend valuable hours towards the end of the
research period hunting desperately through the library in the vain
Micawber-like hope that ‘something will turn up’ to show you how
to write your answer. Finally, there is long-standing psychological
evidence that once you have consciously articulated certain issues
to be worked on, your subconscious mind will beaver away at them
whilst you are doing other things, with the result that every now
and again an answer or an improvement will pop to the surface.
(The philosopher Bertrand Russell prepared himself for these happy
occasions by carrying round a little notebook in which to write these
ideas down.) In this way you save time because your subconscious can
be working on one essay while your conscious attention is engaged
on another.
The steps summarised above we shall now treat in more detail.
2
Choosing a topic
Your choice of a topic on which to write should be governed most
importantly by your own personal interest and ‘prejudice’. Your only
guide in this matter is yourself. Some people think that if you are too
committed to a subject you will write an essay which is too strongly
influenced by your desire to entrench a particular point of view,
irrespective of evidence. This should not worry you, provided that
you draw an important distinction. This is a distinction between your
interest in the subject as being worthy of study and a commitment
to be as detached as you can when you eventually come to analyse
the evidence which supports one or another answer to the question.
The early stages of preparing an essay dealt with in this chapter are
purely private. So choosing a topic, like your first reflections on it,
can be governed by as much self-interest and prejudice as you care to
allow. It would be much more a problem if you find that none of the
topics on a list interests you. If that happens, you should try to work
one out for yourself on some aspect of the course that does interest
you and then gain your tutor’s approval of it.
There are some subsidiary issues which might enter into your
choice of topic, and which might influence you in favouring one over