Honestly, the most important thing I think freshmen can learn is that a thesis you write before doing research is just a throwaway sentence.  You do the research, gather quotes, and then you write a thesis, and that doesn’t make the paper less self-directed or relevant; it just makes it something you have the ability to write as an undergrad.

If there’s something you want to write about, but all your sources say the opposite, you write about why your view of the thing was so different from the more usual one.  You write the “this is what everyone thinks, and this is why they think it, and this view being the most popular one is invalidating to me and my lived experience” paper.  You gather quotes you can argue with.  Any good paper will put you in conversation with your source material, and sometimes that conversation is an argument.

Honestly, one of the most disappointing things about research papers is that, unless they're in Communication or Anthropology, you aren't really allowed to use even the most insightful blog posts, and even then, it's hard to portray the collaborative nature of blogging in that setting.  You can cite a video or an unrecorded lecture or a Powerpoint slide outside the context of a presentation, but it's bad form to cite a blog post.

I think one of the responsibilities of the new generation of scholars is to legitimize social media as a form of communication.  It should be worth something to say, "this post about x got hundreds of thousands of notes and sparked a lot of discussions and that is significant" or "this is in tag format, but it still has value as a concept."  I could write a paper about Actual Cannibal Shia LeBeouf and the performing arts histories that converged to make it possible, but I can't incorporate someone's tags about depression being caused by sustained mental injury into my paper about how parental violence and social devaluation contribute to the frequent use of themes of trauma and mental illness in black women's literature, and that's a shame.

*starts gathering quotes*

*glances up at page count*

"Page 6 of 60"

*takes the quotes I have and nopes the fuck out*