Knocking the Research Topic Down to Size

"I'm going to write about changes in the 21st century!" announces the
overachieveing English 201 student.

"I'm focusing on bilingual education!" proclaims her peer-review partner.

Very ambitious, wouldn't you say? Do you see a problem here? These aren't
topics - they're general subject areas. These students have not yet asked
the question, "What about it? What about bilingual education? And what
kind of changes are you talking about anyway?"

Such questions represent the first step a student must take to narrow down
a general subject area into a workable, manageable paper, the kind that
focuses in on a clearly identified issue and examines it thoroughly within
the allotted time and space. After all, you can't - and undoubtedly don't -
want to write an entire book every time you're given a paper to write.
Narrowing down is a skill that you must develop to survive in any level of
post-secondary education.

SO HOW DO YOU GO FROM A GREAT BIG IDEA TO SOMETHING MORE

“WORKABLE”????

Narrowing down a topic usually means focusing on a small part of the topic
or on a particular approach to it. Consider, for example, the possible
research questions developed from the broad subject area of bilingual
education:

• Should bilingual education be extended to monolingual children?

• What teaching methods work best in bilingual classrooms?

• What reasons do parents have for sending (or not sending) their
children to bilingual schools?

• Are children placed in bilingual programs more successful in later

grades?

These more specific questions can give your research a sense of direction.

It is also useful to run yourself through a series of self-examining questions

in order to orient yourself to your task.

1) What exactly is my purpose in this paper?

(a) Do I want to convince a particular audience that I am right about a

specific point? (This is an argumentative purpose.)

(b) Do I need to draw general conclusions from facts and specific evidence?
(This is an analytical purpose.)

(c) Do I want to explain something in detail and show its role in a larger
context? (This is an explanatory purpose.)

The well-done research paper can make use of all three approaches, so you
will need to ask yourself these questions as you progress; however, it is
sometimes much more manageable to stick to just one of these methods
(argumentative, analytical, or explanatory). A shorter paper usually
emphasizes one approach over the others (and some will argue that all
papers by definition are argumentative).

2) Who is my intended audience? (True, it's your instructor first and your
classmates second at this point in your career. But it won't always be this
way, and you might as well get into good habits early on – for this paper,
you can pretend your audience is whoever you want it to be).

3) What is my persona as writer? How do I view myself in relation to the

issue? What kind of “image” to you want to present in your paper? Do you
want to be an “authority” on your topic? Do you want to be an inquisitive
investigator? Do you want to be an impartial “Switzerland”- type writer?

--and finally --

4) What is my proposed thesis or hypothesis? This comes from your

research question (ahhh! The horror!) This is crucial. We'll return to this.

Reaching the stage where you are capable of writing a preliminary thesis is
perhaps the hardest part of this entire process. You may feel as if you're
swimming in a vast, formless sea without any sense of direction. You have
no idea whether your source reading will turn out to be useful or whether
you're just wasting your time. As you progress, you may even find yourself
throwing out notes and entire sources as irrelevant. This is actually a good
sign - it means you're beginning to discriminate between useful and useless
sources, and that means you're one step closer to transforming that
preliminary thesis into your final statement.

Finally, be patient and keep moving. In due course, the vast sea will
gradually contract into a well-defined back yard swimming pool!

To give you perspective, here's a few visualizations of how this process

works: