Choosing a Topic Through Basic Research.

Blog Post #1 January 14, 2018

In the article "Choosing a Topic" from the Bedford Book of Genres, the reader is given step by step helpful tools to assist them in selecting a topic for a research paper. Basically, the article goes through the dos and don'ts of selection.

The first section is titled Brainstorming Topic Ideas: Read, Talk, Stretch Enjoy. This section helps with the most difficult part of topic selection, where to start? The article suggests picking a few general, reliable sources such as CNN, New York Times, Google Scholar, and Slate and skimming some scholarly articles on some topics that interest you. It is important to not take all day doing this step, but just getting some simple information and generate ideas so you can be better equipped to make a topic selection. Another recommendation this section makes is to talk to people (classmates, friends, family, etc.). Attempting to explain you’re topic ideas allows for better focus on the part of the topics you are actually considering. Some ways the article suggests organizing your thoughts and focusing a topic are making a list, freewriting, and mind mapping. These three tools will help you stray away from the cliché topics and get some creative ideas.

The takeaway from the section that I summarized is advice on how to find a place to start. For me, the hardest part of choosing a topic is finding a place to start looking for one. Using the brainstorming ideas in this article can help the author do the very difficult task of starting. I think the best way to find a topic is to use the ideas this article gives such as mind mapping, free writing, etc. to find something that really sparked my interests. In my opinion it is really important to find a topic that is interesting to you because if you aren’t passionate about it you will dread writing it and the final product will not be successful. Therefore, these brainstorming ideas can help the author find something that you want to write about. There are a lot of essay topics that I already know the answers to so it is important for me to stray away from those because they lead for less interesting papers. If I come across a topic I already know a lot about I am going to stray away from it and choose something I know less about so I can do better research and write a better paper. If i already knew a lot about something i wouldn’t feel like I needed to do as much research and would end up with a dry paper. I haven’t committed to a community yet, but I do have a few ideas. Most of the ideas I do have for the paper are ones that were in the cliché categories on the syllabus so I am trying to stray away from those and think about new topics.