What are you going to write about? Maybe this isn’t a difficult question. Perhaps your instructor has assigned a topic or a broad subject area. Or maybe you’re already itching to write that essay on the intelligence of crows, a topic you’ve always wondered about but never had the chance to explore. More often, however, when confronted with a research assignment, students initially draw a blank. In this chapter, there are a range of ideas about how to generate research topics. You should be able to draw on these strategies even when you’re assigned a subject to write about.

One of the themes of this chapter is that virtually any topic might be the focus on a research essay—if you can find the right question to ask about it. Most investigations are driven by questions, not answers, and another purpose of this chapter is to get you thinking about what makes a question "researchable." This may not be as obvious at it seems.

Is it obvious that your own curiosity should drive your investigation? Perhaps not, particularly given the experience many of us have had writing research reports on topics that held little interest. Again and again, this chapter returns to the idea that inquiry often begins with a sense of wonder. What have you seen or experienced or read or heard that raises questions that research might help answer?

Much of this chapter is devoted to how to use the campus library and the Internet to develop a “working knowledge” of your topic. This is a basic understanding that would allow you to talk, without interruption, for about five minutes about the topic. A “working knowledge” is still a fairly superficial understanding, but it can be enormously helpful as you work this week to refine your research question and prepare to do more in-depth research.

The chapter concludes by inviting you to reflect a bit about how you read two very different kinds of texts: a story and an excerpt from an academic article. Why spend time thinking about your reading habits? Because so much of the research process involves reading, you can improve the efficiency with which you read and use sources by becoming a “strategic” reader.

The learning objectives for this chapter include the following:

• Help you to discover a tentative topic for your research essay, and refining the question that you’ll focus on.

• Develop the idea of a “researchable question.”

• Introduce the notion of a “working knowledge” of your topic and guide you to basic references in the university library and on the Internet that will help you gain a working knowledge of your topic.

• Encourage you to reflect on your reading habits and consider ways to tailor how you read to the situation of writing a research paper.

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