should make sure that your writing sample at least acknowledges the most important work in the area
you’re addressing.
Relatedly: don’t be afraid of writing about a topic that has been around for a long time and hence spawned
a huge literature. You can write a paper about a famous historical figure and be very successful, even if
the paper ends up saying something that other people have said before. Your choice of topic should only
be constrained by where you think you can do your best work.
Usually, a more tightly focused paper is better than a large, programmatic paper. That’s because of the
kind of evidence the writing sample is supposed to provide. If you write some big, sweeping thing, the
arguments will by necessity be incomplete, open to lots of objections. You also won’t have the space to
engage closely with other people’s writings. Nor will you be able to show off your good judgment in
which ideas to pursue in depth, which to set aside, since in a big sweeping paper, nothing is pursued in
depth. By contrast, if you have a tightly focused paper, you can pick a few texts to work with closely:
quote, interpret, and then engage. You can spell out your arguments, consider concerns that one might
have about them, and so on.
Admissions Committees routinely see several hundred applications per application cycle. Your reader(s)
will be tired and pressed for time, both of which make them less ideal readers than we might hope for.
Tired and rushed readers are sloppy readers. Write with that kind of readership in mind. Don’t be afraid
of writing with flair, once you’ve nailed down the philosophy, to capture their attention. But don’t be
afraid of being extremely obvious about what you’re doing. They will be happy to read a paper that is
easy to follow.
As you’ll see as we go along, your writing sample is going to require a lot of work. Your choice of topic
should be informed in no small part by whether you can see yourself spending a lot of time on it.
Finally, and I have some perhaps extreme views on this. Some students produce an honors thesis as part
of their undergraduate education. These honors theses are usually significantly longer than a writing
sample. If that’s true of you, don’t submit excerpts of your thesis if you can at all help it. Excerpts that are
cut and pasted together just don’t show off your ability to write a single, coherent piece of philosophical
prose where the philosophical ambition and judgment matches the constraints of the format. This is not
to say that you can’t produce a writing sample on the same topic as your thesis. But if you do, you really
need to think about this writing sample as its own paper in the same area, with a more tightly focused
thesis, etc.
5 Finding The Right-Size Topic
Perhaps the writing sample is the first longer paper you have to write. So how do you go about doing
it? My advice: don’t worry about finding a topic that is the right size for a writing sample at the outset.
Instead, start with a topic that interests you. As you learn more about it, you can make a decision about
whether to expand or limit, and you will most likely have to revisit that decision.
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Depending on your thinking style, your proclivities, and the particular project, you may have a really big
picture idea, in which case the challenge will be to find some aspect of the big picture idea to drill down
on. Alternatively, you might find something very small that strikes you as interesting and that you want
to understand better. Perhaps it’s a puzzling paragraph, a confusing concept, or an astounding argument.
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There’s a general methodological point here: I don’t believe in outlining papers early on in the writing process, since how an
argument or paper actually goes depends on the details, and you can’t work out the details without actually trying to write the
paper. Once you’ve spent a lot of time writing the paper, you’ll be in a position to outline. (See also the section on Workflow below.)
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