I’m on the trail of Dr. Evil, that nefarious nexus of nastiness who distracts writers from their work.

Who is this malicious miscreant?

Why, he’s the one who makes it impossible for writers to figure out what the heck they’re supposed to write about.  You know how it goes.  Your instructor (clearly one of Dr. Evil’s Malicious Minions!) gives you an assignment to write a paper, but doesn’t give you much direction about what the paper’s supposed to be about.

So what do you do?

You could pull out a dart board, paste words from your class randomly on the board and…well…you get the idea!  (It helps in this process if you occasionally can actually hit the dartboard.  I’m just saying…)

You could sob and cry and tear out your hair in horror until you finally realize you have only three hours to write a fifteen page term paper, at which point you contemplate practicing, “You want fries with that?” in your best professional tone.

But if neither of these sounds good to you, why not consider playing Super Sleuth and tracking down a terrific research paper topic?  How do you do that, you ask?

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