Getting Writing Done

Summary

What makes a good research topic? Clearly, you need a topic in the sweet spot for research, where you can easily find studies and even books on it, without the topic being so common or popular that your readers will experience profound déjà vu with the first paragraph. Yet some other factors determine which research will lodge stubbornly in our memories. In fact, some research can excite professors who believe they’ve seen everything and even draw the attention of news media. These factors include the usual suspects that distinguish stories in the news from the stories destined to languish in obscurity: currency, relevance, and novelty. But the last item, novelty, is the one that shapes our recall more powerfully than any of the other nine features of newsworthiness. In fact, when you harness novelty to uncertainty, you elicit the greatest interest and most intense recall. If you wonder how to pull off this trick of combining novelty and uncertainty, the answer is both simple and surprisingly common, if you know what to look for. Harness the power of paradox – a statement with a conclusion the opposite of what the audience expects – and you make research into something both memorable and attention-grabbing. Moreover, once you know how paradox works, you’ll spot it at work in virtually every news story that crosses over from the dry realms of research and into mainstream news media and national conversations.