From Thought to Essay

For those of you dealing with my "Who Am I?" assignment, this essay may be particularly useful.

What's going through the mind of the reporter who writes the article about what goes through the mind of the police officer who pulls over a motorist? Are you still with me? Kevin Ransom wrote an article regarding the mindset of cops performing traffic stops for AOL Auto. While Ransom's work is interesting in helping us to understand the mindset of the officer, I thought it might be interesting to consider how that article popped into Ransom's head.
Did he wake up one morning and think, "Hey, I'd better write an article or they won't pay me this week?" That may have happened. After all, Samuel Johnson tells us that "no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." But, having decided that he would write an article, how did Ransom come to this topic?
Unfortunately, I can't find an email link for Mr. Ransom, so we'll have to attempt to infer his motives from what he wrote. I'd like to suggest a couple of routes he might have taken in order to reach this article.
First, and most obvious, Ransom might be the recent recipient of that most unwelcome of slips of paper: the traffic ticket. While sitting in his car as the officer ran his plates, our intrepid reporter may have considered how he might make these particular lemons into lemonade. "I wonder what's going through that guy's head right now?" he may have asked himself. And then he knew how to proceed.
Or, perhaps Ransom found himself in a social setting with a police officer. "You know what I've always wanted to know?" he may have begun before drawing out of the cop a long explanation of the psychology of traffic stops.
Maybe, if we'd manage to talk with this reporter, we'd find that his mind took an entirely different route to this article. It really doesn't matter. My point here is simply that you, as a student writer, can use the events, oddities, and exceptions of your day as the jumping off point for interesting papers. Rather than knocking out the same old tired topics in the same old tired way, pay attention to your life, the news, and the vicissitudes of existence for the seeds of a good essay. In a subject-matter course, say history or psychology, look for places where the news and the course reading overlap. Look for places where your curiosity is piqued or you're irritated. Those are the departure points for meaningful writings. If you'll do this for a while, you'll soon find that you have far more good ideas than you could ever effectively develop.