3.7 (p.52) The process of topic discovery.

The Paradigm Online Writing Assistant has prompts to help you discover what to write about.

You can either scroll down the page to find out details about prewriting, or you can select a topic from the menu on the left. If you pick a menu item you will skip down through the page to that topic. For example, if you want to know about “The Journalist’s Questions,” you will go directly to that information.

Using journalist’s questions—who, what, when, where, how, and why—provides an excellent way to begin choosing a topic because the questions can help you delve into a topic. For example, if you are interested in the topic of adoption, you can begin by asking yourself the following questions:

• Who is interested in adoption? or Who runs adoption agencies?
• What is an adoption agency?
• When are children most often adopted?
• Where do interested parents go to talk to somebody about adopting a child?
• How are parents and children “matched up” in the adoption process?
• Why are children given up for adoption?

After selecting only one of these questions, you can narrow your topic further by asking more questions. For instance, if you choose to research adoption agencies, you can then start to ask who works there, what kind of clientele they work with, how they place children in families, how could adoption agencies be improved, and so on.

This site offers other techniques for choosing a subject, such as freewriting, dramatism, and using outside sources. You may need to experiment with more than one suggestion before you find a topic that you are interested in researching.