IDENTIFYING TOPICS

Steps in Planning Research Projects

• Find a specific topic
• Question that topic to catch your interest
• Determine the kind of evidence to support your answer
• Determine whether you can find those data
Start to Find A Topic
• Start with what most interests you
• List as many interests as you can that
you’d like to explore
• Choose the one or two that interest you most.
Finding Your Topic
• Look up your topic in a general bibliography/ encyclopedia entries in the
library or onlline. Start with standard ones such as the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. Then Skim the subheadings to find a more narrow focus/
specialized ones
• Google your topic. Look first for Web sites that are roughly like sources you
would find in a library. Copy the list of references at the end for a closer look.
• Skim headings in specialized indexes, such as Women’s Studies Abstracts,
Speech Act Abstracts, Dialect Abstracts. Use subheadings for ideas of how
others have narrowed your topic.
• Use Google Scholar, a search engine that focuses on scholarly journals and
books. Skim the articles it turns up, especially their lists of sources.
 Narrowing Your Topic
Free will in Tolstoy Too broad
The history of commercial aviation (consist only four or
five words)
How to narrow the topics?

1. Restate the topics in full sentences

(1) Free will in Tolstoy topic → There is free will in Tolstoy’s novels.claim

(2) The history of commercial aviation topic → Commercial aviation has a history.claim

Results: The claims are too general and don’t generate curiousity
 Narrowing Your Topic
2. Add words and phrases, but of a special kind: conflict, description,
contribution, and developing. (Nominalization)

Free will in Tolstoy ➞ The conflict of free will and inevitability in

Tolstoy’s description of three battles in War and
Peace

The history of ➞ The contribution of the military in developing the DC- 3

commercial aviation in the early years of commercial aviation
Narrowing Your Topic
3. Restate the revised topics

The conflict of free will and In War and Peace, Tolstoy describes
inevitability in Tolstoy’s description three battles in which free will and
of three battles in War and Peace inevitability conflict

The contribution of the military in In the early years of commercial

developing the DC- 3 in the early aviation, the military contributed to the
years of commercial aviation way the DC- 3 developed.

Caution: Don’t narrow your topic so much that you can’t find data on it.
From Specific Topic to Questions
• After deciding specific, don’t find all the data you can on your
general topic,
• But formulate questions that point you to just those data that you
need to answer them.
• Ask using standard questions: who, what, when, and where,
but focus on how and why.
• Ask questions about your topic’s history, composition, categories,
and any other question.
From Specific Topic to Questions
• Record all the questions that spark your interest
• Look for the questions that other researchers ask but don’t answer
• Evaluate the questions,
• Look for questions whose answers might make you (and, ideally, your
readers) think about your topic in a new way
• Focus more on how and why, instead of who, what, where, when
• You may combine the how and why question, such as
How and why have users of the Alamo story given the event
a mythic quality?
From Questions to Their Significances
• Once you have a question(s), ask the next question
So what? Beyond your own interest in its answer, why would others think it
a question worth asking?

So what if I don’t know or understand how butterflies know

where to go in the winter, or how fifteenth- century musicians
tuned their instruments, or why the Alamo story has become a
myth?
So what if I can’t answer my question? What do we lose?
Steps in Identifying Significance
1. what you are writing about— I am working on the topic of . . .

2. what you don’t know about it—because I want to find out . . .

3. why you want your reader to know and care about it—in order to
help my reader understand better . . .
Steps in Identifying Significance
Steps in Identifying Significance
Problem is itself Problem