How to Pick a Paper Topic

I've been trying to come up with a capstone topic for the past few months or so. I was really stressing about it because I wanted it to be something related to my field of rhetoric and also fresh and interesting, maybe somehow related to technology or teaching. All I've done for the past few months is read different journal articles in my field, key different, relevant searches into Google and JSTOR, and just generally looking at stuff. Of course, during none of that did I actually come up with anything worthwhile.

Today, however, as I was sitting by the Xerox machine making numerous copies of something for work, I picked up an eWeek magazine and starting flipping through it. Lo and behold, I find a blurb about Indiana University's ongoing study of synthetic worlds. And then it just came to me: to study the rhetoric and communication styles employed inside these virtual worlds:

• What are the characteristics of communication within a virtual world?

• How do these characteristics differ from communication in the "real world"?

• What, if any, changes does real world communication undergo when practiced by those who also take part in virtual worlds?

• What implications might my findings have in a college writing classroom?
  
• How might the college writing instructor benefit from employing a virtual world for students to write and peer edit within?
• What, if any, effects does participating in a virtual world have on student writing ability and/or attitude toward writing?
  

Tags:

• research
• creativity
• capstone