Your first task in writing an essay is to choose and limit your topic. Your instructor may provide a list of essay topics or an area from which you may choose a topic. The topic you choose should lend itself to critical thought and analysis rather than to mere description and generalization. A common error is to choose a topic that is too broad to treat in the time and word limit allowed. You should focus your essay on something specific: a certain piece of music or part of a piece, a certain musical style or stylistic feature, a certain analytical, theoretical, or historical issue.
For many topics your primary source material should be the music itself, its score and sound recordings. Your secondary sources should include specialized books and periodical articles. You should consider general textbooks and dictionary or encyclopedia articles only as starting points; a good research paper requires the use of more sophisticated source materials.
Acquint yourself thoroughly with the materials in the Music Library. Begin your research with the most recent scholarly materials. Avoid outdated sources and facile works intended for Òmusic loversÓ rather than music scholars. The object of your research paper is to penetrate your topic well beyond the level of a general textbook or listener's guide.
A crucial, and difficult, stage of writing a paper is to frame your topic by setting down in a single sentence or short paragraph the central idea of your proposed paper. This sentence or paragraph may later serve as the initial statement of your essay; at any rate, it should appear early on. This is where you state the critical issue that guides the rest of your essay.
Your central idea should be your own statement, not one merely quoted from some secondary source. It is possible your instructor will want you to submit a central idea before you write the essay, to ensure that your topic and approach are appropriate.
Before you can frame a central idea, you must do some reading on your topic, taking research notes and jotting down your own ideas as you go. Scholars develop individual techniques for taking and organizing notes; for many, their box of 3" x 5" file cards has been replaced by computer files. Remember a few principles:
Meticulously record the sources of all of your notes: author, title, publication data, page numbers. If you forget, you will have to waste much time backtracking later on!
Speaking of cutting and pasting: Modern technology gives us several tools that appear to relieve the drudgery of taking notes. We can snip electronically from on-line files; we can photocopy pages from our printed sources; we can even resort to that defacing weapon, the highlighting pen. This convenience comes at a hidden cost: students too often use these tools to replace a true attempt to understand and evaluate what they read. They deal only with the words of their sources rather than with their ideas. Their resulting essays -- papers full of half-understood points closely paraphrased from their sources -- betray their lack of real intellectual effort.
When you take your research notes, force yourself to use your own words. The act of translating ideas from your source's words into your own will compel you to consider those ideas, to attempt to understand them. If you do not understand them, the translation should be impossible.
And speaking of highlighting pens: If you wish to mark your own books with pencils, pens, or highlighting markers, this is, of course, your right. It is not your right, however, to deface library books! In your research you will often come across valuable library books and scores desecrated by the underlinings and scribblings of thoughtless students. Please do not follow their example!