English 1A
Gavilan College

The Research Process

Step 1: Choose and narrow a topic.

Note: You may have already chosen your topic, but it's worth reviewing the general guidelines for choosing and narrowing a topic.  Some of the principles here will apply even if you've already settled on a topic.

Choose a topic in which you have a personal interest.
No explanation necessary.
Choose a topic that will fit comfortably into a 8-12 page paper.

It needs to be broad enough so that you don’t run out of things to say, but also narrow enough so that you can adequately develop it in the space allowed.  If your topic is too broad, you will find that you don’t have enough room for it all. 

For example, the topic of “American children and medication” would be way too broad.  In order to fully research this subject, you would have to define the subject, classify it into all its different types, analyze and give examples of cause and effect relationships for each type, narrate or describe some of the more damaging effects, and possibly argue for some action to be taken.  Clearly you couldn’t do this in 8-12 pages.  It is possible to narrow your topic too much, though this problem is much less common than the other extreme.  If you choose a topic that’s too narrow, you run the risk of not being able to find much information on it. You might also find yourself several pages short when it comes time to write the paper, and faced with the temptation of adding irrelevant filler (aka "bullshitting") to make it longer.  If you narrow your topic from “children and medication” to “How Ritalin affects the nervous system of a seven year old” you might not be able to find enough info to get 8-12  pages.  Additionally, it might not yield a terribly interesting thesis.  A happy medium might be to research the trend of prescribing Ritalin to children, and then argue whether it is or isn’t being over-prescribed.  This argument could be broken down into several subsections (of which its effect on the nervous system might be one), each one with its own potential for research.
Choose a topic that you can approach with an open mind.

Don't choose your topic with a thesis in mind.  Though the thesis is, of course, central to the final paper, to fix on one now would be to limit your options unnecessarily.  You might have an idea that Ritalin is being over prescribed to children, that it’s damaging and unnecessary, and that we should stop using it to treat “normal” behavior.  If you go into your project with this mindset, however, you may find that you close off an entire avenue of inquiry.  The idea is to keep an open mind – you don’t know all there is to know about your subject.  If you did, you would not need to do any research on it.  The thesis should only come after you have consulted your sources and carefully and critically examined the information before you.