How to Find a Good Topic For a Long Paper

How to Find a Good Topic For a Long PaperTo find a good topic for a long paper, you must first decide what kind of audience you want to target. Some papers are intended for business people and corporate executives. Others are designed for professors and students who need to present their ideas in the form of an essay. Another category is for journalists, who want to research and write a series of stories about a subject and publish them in a newspaper.The goal of a short essay or a long one is to get across your opinion on a topic, and it's hard to achieve this if you're trying to convey an original idea. The best way to do this is to use an analogy. What's the most memorable example of an analogy that you've ever heard? This will be one of the main subjects of your paper, since an analogy that uses well-known information can carry a strong message without being dull.Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found a great example in a psychology experiment called the 'psychic bridge' during t heir research. If you remember only one example of an analogy to use, this should be it. The study was about the power of metaphor in explaining human behavior, and it showed how metaphors could be applied to a whole lot of different things.According to their research, some of the most popular metaphors involve how we think. For example, the fable of the wise old man and the learned young student uses a metaphor for education. Students are encouraged to apply knowledge they've learned to a specific problem, and they are rewarded when they succeed. If the young student is instructed to think like the old man, he'll find out he needs to broaden his educational horizons and try to think outside the box a little.Many successful metaphors involve how we feel. Avery common example is an analogy that implies confidence. In one study, the participants had to fill out a survey that measured their level of confidence in a product, a technology, or an organization. People were taught to state their level of confidence in a product, a product line, or an organization using the three most common metaphors that involve either self-confidence lack of confidence, or both.These are just three of the standard ways people use metaphors to describe themselves. The next step is to pick an example that relates to the topic at hand. You can use the standard cases and combine them to create something even more powerful.In order to come up with a good topic for a long paper, you need to have an understanding of why you're writing the paper in the first place. A great way to find out what those reasons are is to research the topic for a few months. What's the latest news about the topic? What's new information?Another thing to consider is your audience. Is your audience-college students or business executives? What kind of problems do they have that might interest you? Your topic for a long paper is going to depend on these factors, but these are the basics you should be aware of.