IF YOU ARE CHOOSING YOUR OWN TOPIC

• You are interested in;
• You can make a statement about;
• Fits your assignment in terms of length, required research, etc.

1. Make a list of things that you talk and think about. What have you been arguing about late at night with your friends? What issues do you feel strongly about? It is better to take on a topic in which you feel invested, such as the insufficient lighting around campus, the misdefinition of Generation X, or the future of the Social Security system, rather than a generic sort of "social issues" topic such as capital punishment, abortion or euthanasia (besides, your instructor may be tired of reading those papers).

   Two good techniques to develop ideas are brainstorming and freewriting. Brainstorming is a good technique for people who think more visually or get overly concerned when writing in constructing perfect sentences before their ideas are fully developed.

   To brainstorm, take a piece of paper and write down the topic idea in the middle of the paper. Start jotting down any related thoughts, questions, comments that you have on the paper around this central idea. This is very informal: these can be one word, phrases, sentences, or even pictures -- the point is that you are generating thoughts. Quantity rather than quality of thought is important here, you will weed out the useless material later (but sometimes what seems useless now can become important later, too). Once you feel that you have exhausted your thoughts, start drawing connecting lines, circles, whatever, around ideas that seem related or make a point. See what you come up with that may narrow down ideas for a thesis.

   A related idea is freewriting, which may work better for people who like to think in words rather than visually. Start with your topic idea at the top of the page and just start writing down thoughts, with no attention to sentence structure or grammar. Just keep writing anything down, even if you feel stuck or dry, and occasionally glance back at your topic idea to get refocused. You can then start underlining ideas which stand out to you as possibities and start grouping those together.

2. See what other people talk and think about. A major newspaper or good news magazine can be a gold mine for current issues. College students can be very isolated from everyday news; sit down in the library's current periodical section and see what is going on out there.

3. See how you might answer the following questions:
   • I think it is an injustice that....
   • I think there should be more/less regulation of....
   • While most people believe X, I personally believe Y
   .
4. See if you can take a stand. While there are good papers out there that only describe a thing, event or situation, almost all good papers make an argument about something. For instance, a paper about the battle of Midway in World War II could just describe the events of the battle; shifting the focus of the topic to combat fighter pilot training could result in a paper which describes the training techniques of the Allied and Japanese forces and argues that this affected the outcome of the battle.

5. Remember the guidelines of the assignment. If the assignment requires you to do library research, select a topic that is not so new that there may be little written about it already. If you are writing a short paper, a narrower, more personal topic such as your opinion of the new University policy on student fees will be more manageable than, say, outlining the causes of World War I.

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