The two-page paper is essentially a think piece that has been stimulated by some particular feature of a text or document or illustration that you have encountered. It is narrowly focused on a few pieces of evidence but should, ideally, be of larger import. The paper specifies the evidence, it analyzes its implications, it links it to other evidence, interpretations, and scholarship, and it indicates the larger significance of the issues raised. A good title – which catches the reader's attention and suggests a significant argument – is integral to the paper. (“Some Remarks on…” is a bad title.) The two-page paper is not just on or about texts and scholarship. It is not a textbookish survey of some topic. It is not descriptive; it is analytical.
There have been a large number of good two-page paper topics chosen in the courses I have taught. Some examples of good titles (and you know how much emphasis I place on titles): “No Pain No Gain: Maintaining Social Order Through Zhou Mourning Rituals”; “'Losers' in the Tso-chuan ”; “Late-Neolithic China: A ‘Quiet Shift' to Male Domination?”; “The Fluid Dynamics of Statecraft”; “A Bird in the Hand is Worth Ten in the Tree”; “Interpretation or Description: Two Histories of Western Chou”; “How to Identify a Barbarian”; “ Real Men Don't Read Greek: The Heroic Standard in Ancient China.” Note how most of these titles imply an argument and concentration on a particular kind of evidence. They are not “global” titles like “The Role of Women in Ancient China” or “Death and Society in Chinese History.”
The two-page paper is the “dirty-handed” paper: it derives from percepts, not from concepts . It draws its initial strength from contact with the evidence, not from stimulation by the world of ideas. Just as Confucius said to his son, “If you don't know the Shi [Poetry Classic], you don't know how to talk,” ( Analects 16.13.2; cf. 1.15.3), so I would suggest, “If we don't write two-page papers, we won't know how to write longer ones.” Two page papers are hard to write because they require an idea, an inspiration, a light bulb switching on above your head. And so will longer ones, when the time comes for you to write them.