Every student, no exceptions, knows what it’s like to hear the word “essay” when it comes to homework. As painful as it might sound for everyone who earns formal education, written tasks can also be pretty fun if they’re approached properly. One of the most important things in every kind of work is an organization, so this should be a starting point for all students. At the same time, the starting point in essay organization is choosing the topic, which can also be one of the hardest steps in essay writing. So, how to develop a strong topic for your work without taking forever and draining all your lifeforce? Let’s get things sorted out once and for all.
Taking a Good Start
Although there are quite a lot of different instructions outlining a proper approach to selecting a topic for an essay, lots of students have trouble with where to begin. What would be the scope? What is known about the subject? Is any of that knowledge reliable? Interestingly, this problem can be found on both ends. Students who are not very familiar with their subject, panic because they cannot figure where to start researching. At the same time, students who know a lot about the subject, find it difficult to start filtering out only the necessary information. Still, if you take the problem by bits or, rather, steps, everything becomes much clearer. So, let’s start.
- Brainstorm through the subject. Brainstorming is one of the basic steps recommended by lots of universities and online resources. However, most of them advise brainstorming through everything you know about the topic of your essay or somewhere around it. Yet, that sounds a bit silly since the problem is picking the topic in the first place. So, it’s much better to think about everything you know about your subject and the material related to your potential topic. It could be a chapter or two from your textbook. Try to remember and revise everything you learned. Reread the chapters and some basic additional information. This way, you’ll set the right direction for your topic.
- Start building up your topic by responding to the questions. Oftentimes, you can find the questions at the end of each chapter in your textbook. To build up a topic, try to generate short and direct responses that would make up a sentence or two. Responding directly to the research questions is a very good practice that gets largely overlooked by many students even when their only task is to respond to those questions. And creating responses to questions that are directly related to your subject gives you a great start and ensures that you pick up a relevant topic and write a relevant work in the end.
- Gather keywords. As you’re still in the process of researching your subject, you can get even narrower by highlighting or copying the keywords related to your subject. Now, you have the responses to the questions that outline the basic knowledge needed for your topic and essay, and you have the right way to put your topic so that it would sound as relevant as possible to what you study. If you take a look through some of the best paper writing services compared, you’ll see that most of them recommend collecting keywords right away. This trick will also help you greatly when you write your essay and especially when you write a longer piece, such as a research paper as keywords must be listed there in an abstract.
- Put an accent on analysis. Summary essays are pretty rare. So, even if it’s not directly pointed out by the task sheet, your essay will have to analyze a certain concept or aspect of your subject. By constructing an analytically driven topic, you’ll be able to avoid any misconceptions that can fail your paper right from the start. To do this, try to respond to not “what?” but rather “why?” questions explaining what your concept or aspect might mean from different perspectives.
- Select the topic that interests you the most. As you already have a few options by narrowing down the subject to topic, it’s time to pick the one that interests you the most. While it might seem unimportant, enthusiasm is a great booster for your writing. Should you be interested in what you are to write, you’re going to write about it with passion, researching every detail and being able to build up a strong argument that will be traced throughout the whole work.
Not the End (Yet)
Now that you’ve picked up a topic, it’s still early for celebrations as you still have a paper to write. But as you have your topic picked, this essay will seem much less complex and hard to write. Taking a good start in writing an academic piece of work is as important as any other element of it, such as thesis statement, correct wording, and knowledge of the subject. There are many ways to pick the topic for your essay and all of them are right, yet narrowing down the subject to your topic is, perhaps, the easiest way to go, especially if you’re not very familiar with or interested in the subject.
BIO:
Being his major talent, writing, along with researching, has always been an integral part of Mark Blackwood’s life. As he started writing his paper at high school, he was frequently praised for his creativity and ability to put complex things simply by teachers and peers alike. Fast-forward to the present day, and Mark is happy with his job as a full-time reporter, traveling journalist, and educator.
