Choosing Your Topic
Think of writing a paper as joining an ongoing conversation between many scholars in a
specific discipline. Before you, as a scholar, can join in that conversation, you need to
do some background reading in order to discover what has come before, and to find a
topic in which you are interested enough to research further and on which you care to
give an opinion.
So the first thing you should do when trying to choose a topic for a paper is go to the
library and browse through some appropriate texts.
For example, say you're writing a persuasive essay for your Essay Composition class,
and you're interested in arguing about the benefits of taking an additional English
lesson. Before deciding on your specific topic and stand, you might:
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Browse through various journals within the discipline of English studies or
English Language Learning
Visit English learning-related websites
Go to the stacks to look at the tables of contents of various books on the subject.
Then, after you had a pretty good idea about what experts in the field were saying about
the subject of a private English class, you would be able to make a knowledgeable
choice about what specific topic you wanted to write about.
The most important thing to remember when choosing your topic is that
you should, if at all possible, choose to investigate a topic in which you are
truly interested. Here are some exercises to help you locate a topic which
you may want to research further:
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Look around you. Why are you here at the university? What do you notice daily?
What conversations have you overheard that have made you curious? Have you
spent the rest of the day muttering about what you would have said if you had
been one of the participants? What current debates on campus make you
nervous or excite you?
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Read a more national paper, such as the Jakarta Post or the Herald Tribune and
notice what sections you read first, what articles seem compelling to you. Watch
the evening news, either local or national. Did anything make you angry? Did any
story make you feel as if you wanted to take action in some way?
QUESTIONS:
1. Now think of how you would specify your topic into an essay title?
2. How do you think you would organize your essays? What idea you would include
in the essay?