I want to share a couple of thoughts with you as you’re working on your problems this week.
1. Thoughts about Topic Choice.
One way to choose a topic if you’re having trouble is to think of a large-scale problem and then narrow it to your community. For example, if you were concerned with something like climate change, what kinds of environmental changes could you make in your community? A more robust recycling program? More resources for electric cars? Mass transit improvement? Take a large problem and offer a small solution that one community can enact.
2. Reasons for the Problem.
You may have specific reasons for wanting to write about your chosen problem, but you may need to consider different reasons for your audience. Your audience is the group of people who can enact your solution. This may mean city officials or voters. For example, let’s say you were going to write about homelessness in your town. While you could discuss the hardships faced by the homeless, some people may not care and may fail to see a problem—How do you motivate those people? They may not care about the homeless, but they probably care about property values and crime rates and the city’s image because these things affect them financially (at least city leader and many voters would care).
As another example, when I taught at K-State, there was a parking problem. You couldn’t find a parking spot on campus after 8:05 am. Literally. Students always wanted to write their proposals about this problem, but they struggled with choosing good reasons. They would offer complaints about parking tickets and getting tickets (or their vehicles getting a boot) when they were just running into the library for a few minutes. I would point out that college administrators don’t care; they would tell the students to make better plans. To show that it’s a problem, students would need to offer the college president better reasons. Like how the parking problem might hamper recruiting or cause students to choose KU instead of K-State. The point to remember is that when choosing reasons that show why the problem is a problem, you need to show how your readers are effective. (And money is often powerfully persuasive.)
So remember to consider what motivates your audience as you’re choosing a potential problem and beginning the research process for the problem section of your paper. Alas, no extra credit this time, but there will be at least one more offering in a blog post before the semester’s end.
