Always keep assignment details from your teacher in mind. When in doubt, ask your instructor for feedback.
Jot down any and all ideas that come to mind. Consider the following questions:
If you aren't sure what you want to write about yet, try looking at what others are writing about.
Creating a mind map or concept map can help you explore your topic. This may help you narrow down your topic, find a specific research question, or think about alternative ways to search.
The example below shows how a single topic such as American culture, can expand into many smaller or related topics like religion, marriage, art, language, holidays, and beyond. Each subtopic can usually expand further. For example, the topic of American art includes painting, photography, comedy, film, Broadway, etc.
Learning more about a topic is an important first step in research, sometimes called background research.
Browse these for topic ideas or to learn more about today's debates.
Find short explanations of different concepts, events, people, and places.
To find more, search for a topic in Spartan Search and select the Resource Type filter "Reference Entries."
While you may want to solve world hunger, that's not likely to happen in a short paper due next week. Instead, you will need to find a smaller topic.
Try narrowing big topics by:
You can also narrow by who, what, when, where, and/or why. These can be informed by what you find when you do some exploratory searching or background research.
Yes! Some very specific questions may not have been written about yet.
Sometimes, this can be resolved by combining the existing evidence. Other times, it can be a gap in the literature. Unless you're planning to do some original research, you may need to adjust your question.
Before abandoning your topic, do some search troubleshooting or ask a librarian.