If you are coming to this chapter after working through some of the earlier chapters in this book, then you are ready to dive into your research essay. By this point, you probably have done some combination of the following things:

• Thought about different kinds of evidence to support your research;
• Been to the library and/or the internet to gather evidence;
• Developed an annotated bibliography for your evidence;
• Written and revised a working thesis for your research;
• Critically analyzed and written about key pieces of your evidence;
• Considered the reasons for disagreeing with and/or questioning the premise of your working thesis;
• Categorized and evaluated your evidence.

In other words, you already have been working on your research essay through the process of researched writing.

But before diving into writing a research essay, you need to take a moment to ask yourself, your peers, and your teacher some important questions about the nature of your project.

What is the specific assignment?

It is crucial to consider the teacher’s directions and assignment for your research essay. The teacher’s specific directions will in large part determine what you are required to do to successfully complete your essay. They may specify how many sources you need to consult, how your essay should be organized, and how long it should be. The directions may even determine your topic. If you have been given the option to choose your own research topic, the assignment for the research essay itself might be open-ended. Alternatively, your instructor may have assigned you a topic to write about.

What is the main purpose of your research essay?

Has the goal of your essay been to answer specific questions based on assigned reading material and your research? Or has the purpose of your research been more open-ended and abstract, perhaps to learn more about issues and topics to share with a wider audience? In other words, is your research essay supposed to answer questions that indicate that you have learned about specific subject matter (usually a topic that your teacher already more or less understands), or is your essay supposed to discover and discuss an issue that is potentially unknown to your audience, including your teacher?

The “demonstrating knowledge about a specific topic” purpose for research is quite common in academic writing. For example, a political science professor might ask students to write a research project about the Bill of Rights in order to help her students learn about the Bill of Rights and to demonstrate an understanding of these important amendments to the U.S. Constitution. But presumably, the professor already knows a fair amount the Bill of Rights, which means she is probably more concerned with finding out if you can demonstrate that you have learned and have formed an opinion about the Bill of Rights based on your research and study.

“Discovering and discussing an issue that is potentially unknown to your audience” is also a very common assignment, particularly in composition courses. As the examples included throughout this chapter suggest, the subject matter for research essays that are designed to inform your audience about something new is almost unlimited.

How do you select a topic?

If your instructor allows you free choice of topics, the choices can be almost overwhelming. How do you narrow the task to something that interests you, is manageable, and that has enough sources in the library or online to sustain an engaging argument? The best place to start looking for a research project topic is to examine your own interests, passions, and hobbies. What topics, events, people, or natural phenomena, or stories interest, concern you, or make you passionate? What have you always wanted to find out more about or explore in more depth?

To narrow the focus of your topic, you may try freewriting exercises, such as mindmapping or brainstorming. As the example below suggests, you can create a map with both images and text, which are related to branches centered on the main focus, “time management.” Based on this kind of mindmap, you have to narrow down or choose specific parts of your ideas instead of including all the ideas and topics that you had during the mindmapping process. You simultaneously want to ask a question–a broad, open-ended question that will guide your research. It is not necessary to propose a possible answer or working thesis at this stage, but you can speculate about a kind of argument that you can build through research. You may use your research question and working thesis to create a research proposal. For this part of writing, see “Identifying Issues for Research.”

Looking into the storehouse of your knowledge and life experiences will allow you to choose a topic for your research project in which you are genuinely interested and in which you will be willing to invest plenty of time, effort, and enthusiasm. Simultaneously with being interesting and important to you, your research topic should, of course, interest your readers. As you have learned from the chapter on rhetoric, writers always write with a purpose and for a specific audience.

Therefore, whatever topic you choose and whatever argument you will build about it through research should provoke a response in your readers. And while almost any topic can be treated in an original and interesting way, simply choosing the topic that interests you, the writer, is not, in itself, a guarantee of success of your research project.

Here is some advice on how to select a promising topic for your next research project. As you think about possible topics for your paper, remember that writing is a conversation between you and your readers. Whatever subject you choose to explore and write about has to be something that is interesting and important to them as well as to you.

When selecting topics for research, consider the following factors:

• Your existing knowledge about the topic
• What else you need or want to find out about the topic
• What questions about the topic (or what aspects of it) are important not only for you but for others around you
• Resources (libraries, internet access, primary research sources, and so on) available to you in order to conduct a high quality investigation of your topic.

Read about and “around” various topics that interest you. As we argue later on in this chapter, reading is a powerful invention tool capable of teasing out subjects, questions, and ideas which would not have come to mind otherwise. Reading also allows you to find out what questions, problems, and ideas are circulating among your potential readers, thus enabling you to better and more quickly enter the conversation with those readers through research and writing.

If you have an idea of the topic or issue you want to study, try asking the following questions

• Why do I care about this topic?
• What do I already know or believe about this topic?
• How did I receive my knowledge or beliefs (personal experiences, stories of others, reading, and so on)?
• What do I want to find out about this topic?
• Who else cares about or is affected by this topic? In what ways and why?
• What do I know about the kinds of things that my potential readers might want to learn about it?
• Where do my interests about the topic intersect with my readers’ potential interests, and where they do not?

• Which topic or topics have the most potential to interest not only you, the writer, but also your readers?

Continue Reading: 19.3 Planning Your Research