Research and term paper writing guidelines

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How to Choose the Best Topic for a Research Paper

One assessment that your teacher may use to see how well you understand a concept is to have you write a research paper. Research papers analyze a topic, draw a conclusion, and report on that conclusion using supporting evidence. Therefore, the topic that you choose is really important to how well you are able to write the paper. There are a few things to consider when choosing a topic. You want to make sure that you have a broad topic to have enough information on it and narrow enough that you won’t have to write a book to explain the main points. You also want to make sure that the topic is relevant so that you are learning about a topic that relates to the course you are taking.

How to choose the best topic:

1. Preliminary research

   You can start determining a topic by doing some preliminary research. The preliminary research should unveil some major subtopics that relate to your field of study. A great place to look is one of the major areas listed in the table of contents.

2. Choose a main topic of interest

   Think about the many topics that you have talked about through the year. There are some main subtopics for you to choose from. These subtopics will more than likely still be too broad to write your research paper on.

3. Come up with your research question

   This will be a question that you hope to answer through your research. It is going to be the main purpose of your paper. Your thesis will directly answer this question.

4. Work on your thesis

   The last step that is involved in determining your topic is to develop a thesis statement. If you can successfully write a strong thesis statement, than you know that you have a good topic. If you cannot write a thesis statement, than you would want to start this process over or alter your topic. You can alter your topic by choosing a broader or narrower topic depending on why you struggled to write your thesis statement.

You can use this method to come up with research paper topics for all of your courses and for any research paper that you have to do. The main thing to consider is that you choose an interesting topic that meets this criteria.