A self-directed put-down.

The other month, I was chit-chatting with the one (younger) (white) bartender with the (pussy-hat energy) at the local brewery, and she was telling me about her social science-subject matter college writing class, and while she was doing that, she put herself down and said that she never has any original research ideas.

And, I said that at her stage, much of your reading is just to gather basic information and orient yourself with facts and in fields, and so it’s hard to have an original idea like that, except maybe if there’s some new group and you “cut and paste” existing ideas onto it by analyzing this new data.

And, that pacified her a little bit, but not entirely.

Later, I also thought of how it’s a lot easier to have original paper ideas on a dense literary text where you just explicate that one text, and so the next time that I saw her, I told her that, and that her feelings might be more the result of the type of writing class she chose to take, than anything having to do with her ability, and that seemed to make more sense to her.

I also told her about a great strategy I had come across for making effective papers about a dense literary text -- you find a point in the text where something doesn't seem to make much sense to you, and if you can figure out what's happening and why, that's the paper right there, to present to someone the problem that you had stumbled upon and then solve it for them.