I’ve spent an awful lot of time marking student papers this week. At a guess, around 90% of my feedback has been on a similar theme—something along the lines of, please be more specific.
Probably the most common issue I see in student work across the board has to do with floating in the conceptual ether. Speaking in theory is a surface-level hack for sounding knowledgable, but I tend to develop a feeling of suspicion when the writer fails to ground the conceptual stuff once in a while.
This doesn’t just apply to obviously philosophical things like -isms and -ologies (e.g. positivism, phenomenology). What do you mean by marketing, or science, or music? Without context, these words offer a gist at best, and that makes it really easy for someone to miss the point
Most words have stories in them, if we’re willing to get specific.