Coming to terms with an essay topic – 37
so easily should warn you that some of these things deserve more
emphasis than others. That is to say, you must decide provisionally
which of these factors – or which combination of them – best explain
MacArthur’s success, and which are less important.
One of the popular images of an academic or a scholar is that
you can never get a straight answer to your question. He responds
with an ‘on the one hand’ and an ‘on the other’. This is a caricature
with a certain element of truth. As one burrows more deeply into
a question it becomes harder and harder to answer it simply and
confidently. When England was wracked by the claims and counterclaims of Catholic and Protestant dogma during the early seventeenth
century, it was said of one scholar, William Chillingworth, that he
‘contracted such a habit of doubting that by degrees he grew confident of nothing’. While allowing that the answers to many questions
may be very complicated, you must nevertheless resist succumbing
to this state of mind.
4.2
Problems of meaning and knowledge
Most people find that, while it is easy enough to propose an immediate
tentative answer to some questions, others raise knotty problems of
meaning and interpretation that need to be dealt with first. This will
happen particularly where the topic makes use of terms with which
you are not familiar, where it is worded in a vague or ambiguous
manner, and where you feel you have so little background knowledge of the issues it raises that to speculate about a likely answer is
impossible. We shall treat each of these situations in turn.
Clarifying the meaning of terms
When you are considering the meanings of terms in your essay topics, a major decision you have to make is whether any of them have a
special meaning or use in the discipline you are studying. This applies
equally to what look like ordinary everyday words as it does to those
recherch´ e terms (e.g. ‘recherch´ e’, ‘moiety’, ‘phoneme’, ‘hermeneutic’,
‘deconstruction’) that are rarely to be found in everyday language.
Indeed, it is the more common words that pose a problem, simply
so easily should warn you that some of these things deserve more
emphasis than others. That is to say, you must decide provisionally
which of these factors – or which combination of them – best explain
MacArthur’s success, and which are less important.
One of the popular images of an academic or a scholar is that
you can never get a straight answer to your question. He responds
with an ‘on the one hand’ and an ‘on the other’. This is a caricature
with a certain element of truth. As one burrows more deeply into
a question it becomes harder and harder to answer it simply and
confidently. When England was wracked by the claims and counterclaims of Catholic and Protestant dogma during the early seventeenth
century, it was said of one scholar, William Chillingworth, that he
‘contracted such a habit of doubting that by degrees he grew confident of nothing’. While allowing that the answers to many questions
may be very complicated, you must nevertheless resist succumbing
to this state of mind.
4.2
Problems of meaning and knowledge
Most people find that, while it is easy enough to propose an immediate
tentative answer to some questions, others raise knotty problems of
meaning and interpretation that need to be dealt with first. This will
happen particularly where the topic makes use of terms with which
you are not familiar, where it is worded in a vague or ambiguous
manner, and where you feel you have so little background knowledge of the issues it raises that to speculate about a likely answer is
impossible. We shall treat each of these situations in turn.
Clarifying the meaning of terms
When you are considering the meanings of terms in your essay topics, a major decision you have to make is whether any of them have a
special meaning or use in the discipline you are studying. This applies
equally to what look like ordinary everyday words as it does to those
recherch´ e terms (e.g. ‘recherch´ e’, ‘moiety’, ‘phoneme’, ‘hermeneutic’,
‘deconstruction’) that are rarely to be found in everyday language.
Indeed, it is the more common words that pose a problem, simply