Interest - Blog #1

Something that has caught my interest both in class and also in Chapter 1 of The Curious Researcher is the idea that your topic doesn't have to be new, only your angle does. In previous English courses, I've had professors drum into me over and over and over again that nearly everything has been written about before. That's true, but no one ever told me it's also OK. Until now, the idea that a paper, and especially a research paper, could be exploratory never even occurred to me. For all of the English professors I've had, and there were some really good ones among them, not one mentioned this. They all talked about the dreaded research paper that would be the bane of my existence somewhere in the not to distance future. So much so that just hearing the word "research" makes me shudder a little. So, to have someone actually say "research is exploration" -- that's just a wildly new concept to me and I have to admit, I like it. I find that I put a lot of pressure on myself to have the answers, especially when I'm writing, and that's stressful. So I'm looking forward to a chance to discover something new rather than regurgitating what I already know. Maybe in the process, I'll find my angle on the subject.