Title for a Paper
How to Get an Agent to Act Like an Iraqi
This morning while I was riding my bike this title popped into my head. It's the title for a paper about my experience creating content for the Tactical Language project at USC. I've been wanting to write it for a long while. Along with the title came a mental picture for a first draft of the outline.
Morning rides are a great time for inspiration. When I have a really great idea, it's hard to restrain the urge to turn back immediately and implement them. Write them down, start writing the proposal!
But I do restrain the urge and instead I mentally hang the idea on a hook in a closet in my mind. As I ride along, other ideas come to me. Some come in immediately useful form, like the title for a paper or the idea for a brief, witty article that I can write for web publication, maybe earn a few dollars.
Some of the ideas can be wonderful, but the projects they suggest would take too much time. I can write them in my Daybook, perhaps to be retrieved for some possible future use. Today for example, I had an idea for the design of survey questions about political labeling. It involved a simple issue: the regulation of traffic on a community bike path, using my questions to explore people's ideas about the ideology of common political labels. The interesting part about the idea was that it involved narrative descriptions of behavior, letting people choose a label and explain which aspect of the behavior would prompt the selection of the label. It's a nice idea that would make a good research project for a semester's paper or perhaps another article I could publish, for a few dollars more.
But for now I am setting it aside. The outline for the paper I've been itching to write is the most immediately useful idea, and it is a key part of a project I'm already working on, for longer-term rewards. I plan on getting this paper published in a scholarly journal, and I will have recent published work to show to prospective employers, who, if they read it, will know what I can do. In the longer term, I place my faith in finding the right employment situation, rather than just earning a few dollars here and there for time spent writing little Web pieces.
Not getting off track; keeping ideas, even if they seem wild or silly, on a mental hook, later writing about them in the Daybook and evaluating them in terms of my overall career; these are important parts of my creative practice.
This morning while I was riding my bike this title popped into my head. It's the title for a paper about my experience creating content for the Tactical Language project at USC. I've been wanting to write it for a long while. Along with the title came a mental picture for a first draft of the outline.
Morning rides are a great time for inspiration. When I have a really great idea, it's hard to restrain the urge to turn back immediately and implement them. Write them down, start writing the proposal!
But I do restrain the urge and instead I mentally hang the idea on a hook in a closet in my mind. As I ride along, other ideas come to me. Some come in immediately useful form, like the title for a paper or the idea for a brief, witty article that I can write for web publication, maybe earn a few dollars.
Some of the ideas can be wonderful, but the projects they suggest would take too much time. I can write them in my Daybook, perhaps to be retrieved for some possible future use. Today for example, I had an idea for the design of survey questions about political labeling. It involved a simple issue: the regulation of traffic on a community bike path, using my questions to explore people's ideas about the ideology of common political labels. The interesting part about the idea was that it involved narrative descriptions of behavior, letting people choose a label and explain which aspect of the behavior would prompt the selection of the label. It's a nice idea that would make a good research project for a semester's paper or perhaps another article I could publish, for a few dollars more.
But for now I am setting it aside. The outline for the paper I've been itching to write is the most immediately useful idea, and it is a key part of a project I'm already working on, for longer-term rewards. I plan on getting this paper published in a scholarly journal, and I will have recent published work to show to prospective employers, who, if they read it, will know what I can do. In the longer term, I place my faith in finding the right employment situation, rather than just earning a few dollars here and there for time spent writing little Web pieces.
Not getting off track; keeping ideas, even if they seem wild or silly, on a mental hook, later writing about them in the Daybook and evaluating them in terms of my overall career; these are important parts of my creative practice.
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