EH: English Composition Topic Selection and Understanding Your Topic

To choose a topic for an open-ended assignment, you should find something that you have an interest in, that you are familiar with, and have some knowledge about. Once you have a general topic that you'd like to focus on, find a way to extend the conversation and add a new perspective to the preexisting research about the topic.

While it's helpful to choose topics that you already have understanding about, we don't always have that luxury; and, even if we do have some understanding of a topic, it's important to confirm the knowledge that we already hold by doing background research. Some questions to think about while you are doing background research are:

To start your research, you'll need a list of keywords that you will use that are about your topic. Wikipedia can be a good place to start to generate keywords and get some background information about your topic, but remember, Wikipedia is not a reliable source past this initial search. 

For example, if my topic was how social media affects middle schooler's self esteem, a starting set of keywords might look like this: 

Another way of generating a list of keywords would be making a mind map, like the one below. This will help keep your ideas organized. You can do this by hand on a piece of paper or digitally with websites such as Canva or MindMaps.

The research process is largely trial and error. If I'm not getting many results with a combination of certain key terms, I'll have to try different combinations. While scholarly journals and databases are more credible, their algorithms are not as intelligent as Google's algorithm might be, and they won't automatically pull up results of synonyms of your keywords. To combat this, keep a running list like the one above of the keywords you use in your research and add to it as you go.