Given the current situation of overcrowding in our universities, Umberto Eco book intended primarily for students with few resources and support to those living far from large urban centers with their institutional facilities and no one has explained how to search a book or document libraries and archives.
Despite personal disadvantages, Umberto Eco says, "you can make a decent argument, yet still in a difficult situation, caused by recent or remote discrimination. You can use the occasion of the thesis (...) to retrieve the positive and progressive direction of the study, I understood as a harvest of ideas, but as a critical elaboration of an experience like acquiring a capacity for futura- -good life to troubleshoot problems, to tackle them methodically, to expose them following certain communication techniques. "
The advice in this book is addressed primarily to students of humanities disciplines, including political science and law. The purpose is to teach you how to choose a topic, organize your time, conduct a literature search and structure the work produced.
It is a text that exceeds the category of a mere technical instruction. Umberto Eco knows how to motivate, able to transform anguish into positive voltage, so that any students immediately begin to feel confident in their ability, wanting to find, follow clues and discover something that perhaps no one had seen before. Because this book also discusses the experiences of Umberto Eco when he made his thesis on medieval aesthetics. References to his tactics as a young researcher, warnings against errors and false tracks have an almost suspenseful character. These very personal research councils would not convey anything of real background transformed years later into the investigations adventurous protagonists of his great novels?