Topic Exploration
Chelsea is feeling stressed because her Composition teacher has assigned what feels like a huge, 6-10 page research paper. The research paper can’t be about just anything, though. The paper has to be persuasive, or make an argument of some kind. Chelsea can think of 10 simply informative topics she’d like to write about, but she can’t think of anything that she wants to “argue” about. She doesn’t feel like an expert on anything, so how is she going to persuade someone to agree with her about an important topic? Next week she has to write a short proposal in which she tells her teacher what she will be writing about, and she has no idea what she is going to say.
The first step to writing a great paper begins with asking the right questions. In Chelsea’s situation, she needs to begin by assessing what she knows and then asking what she doesn't know. For example, Chelsea knows the following three things:
-
She knows the length must be 6-10 pages.
-
She knows that since this is a research paper, whatever topic she selects must incorporate the use of scholarly research sources.
-
She knows that she has to make and defend a persuasive claim of some kind. In other words, she must take a stand on an issue about which reasonable people disagree.
Chelsea's teacher told her class to try to choose topics that they are interested in. Since Chelsea knows that this research project will take most of the semester, she wants to pick a topic that will keep her engaged throughout. Chelsea is interested in lots of topics, but she is not certain if they are all good for research, so she goes online and checks out her college's library database to do a little exploratory research. Check out the video to see how Chelsea conducts her search.
Next Steps: Like Chelsea, a good place to start is assessing what you know and what you don't know. Then, try doing a little research online to see if you can find some good sources for your topics. The Topic Exploration blog post on this website has some good questions to think about when selecting a topic. Find other topic questions to answer at the Purdue Owl writing website. After answering these questions and doing some research, Chelsea decides to continue her topic exploration with a Freewriting exercise.
