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Student Resources

Choose and Develop a Topic

Choose a Topic

Tutorials

These tutorials walk you through the topic selection process:

Library Databases & Websites

These databases and websites can help you brainstorm a topic:

Focus Your Topic

NARROW your topic if it's too general for your project.

A couple of ways you can narrow your topic are:

  • Focus on a particular aspect of your topic, such as:
    • Timeframe (the first year of the Civil War)
    • Category of people (plantation owners, slaves, factory workers, etc.)
    • Specific events related to your topic (specific Civil War battles)
    • Place (Memphis, the South, Appalachia, etc.)
  • Add another topic to your original topic:
    • A couple narrowed topics about the Civil War might be "music and the Civil War" or "religion and the Civil War."

B R O A D E N your topic if it's too specific for your project. For instance, you might have trouble finding information about hazing in Southern fraternities.

So, expand your topic:

  • Look for parallels and wider categories (peer pressure among college students)
  • Choose an alternate focus (drug and alcohol use instead of hazing)
  • Choose and alternate place (the entire United States instead of the South)
  • Choose an alternate person or group (fraternities and sororities, young adults, etc.)

 

Develop Keywords

Step 1: List the key concepts that describe your topic (look at words in your essay question or research topic).

Example:

  • If this is your question: Describe the different variations of the Cinderella story that exist across cultures.
  • Then these are your keywords: cinderella, variations, cultures

 

Step 2: List synonyms or related terms and use them in your searches (check an encyclopedia to find related terms, and a thesaurus to find synonyms). Note that you will probably have to run multiple searches to cover all content on your topic.

KEYWORD
   
Cinderella
RELATED TERMS
fairy tales, folk tales
variations
SYNONYM
versions
cultures
RELATED TERM
multicultural

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