ENGL 101/102

Now that you have built your foundation with background information, you can begin to narrow, or refine, your topic.

Use this page to discover ways you can take a broad idea and make it a targeted research question. This will help you start to structure your argument and decide on the angle you want to take with your paper.

Describe and Develop Your Topic

Try filling in the blanks in the following sentence, as much as you can:

I want to research ___(what/who)___
and ___(what/who)___
in ___(where)___
during ___(when)___
because ___(why)___.

Forming a good research question is important before you begin searching for resources because it can determine the difficulty of finding information for your topic. There are several characteristics that good research questions have:

• Clear: It provides enough specifics that one’s audience can understand it without a need for an additional explanation.
• Focused: It’s narrow enough that it can be answered in the space the writing task allows.
• Concise: It’s expressed in the fewest possible words.
• Complex: It doesn’t have a ‘yes’ or ‘no' answer, and requires a synthesis and analysis of ideas and sources prior to composing an answer.
• Arguable: It’s potential answers are open to debate rather than accepted facts.

Here are suggestions to create a more focused research topic:

• Demographic: Try limiting your search to a specific group based off an age range, gender, neurodivergent population, sexual orientation, mental illness, physical handicap, and/or ethnic population. A combination of these groups can further narrow down your topic. (i.e. LGBTQIA teenagers, women with autism, physical therapy among indigenous groups, etc.)
• Geographical: How does your topic impact a country in Africa? Central America? Maybe a specific city in the world, or a state in the USA?
• Animals: Is your topic related to a particular species?
• Society: Avoid using this word altogether and try to think of one aspect of society, such as employment, economy, education, communities, etc.
• Technology: Also avoid this word and think of a particular technological device/software instead, such as smartphones, A.I., social media, etc.