Monday, December 24, 2007

Find a topic that is of interest to you

The first step in writing a paper is worrying about the "topic" or the subject of your research.  What will you write about?

It will seem at first that there is nothing left for you to get started. It will seem like all the topics had been taken and there is nothing left for you to write about.  You professor will most likely encourage you to think of a "problem" that is still unsolved either in your community or on a global scale.  Now when you think of "problems" I am sure that you can come up with many broad ones such as poverty, terrorism, government, politics, religion, etc.  Now try to narrow down those topics or problems into smaller problems and see what you can come up with.  Write down as many as you can under each broad issue and see the best angle or aspect that you might want to tackle.  Let's say you are interested in the worldwide problem of poverty.  What aspect of it would you want to write about?  Try to get hold of papers related to it and find out from which angle you will be approaching the topic this time.  You can have a seemingly popular topic and still use the same but this time from a different angle.

Always make sure that the topic is of interest to you.  It is hard to write an honest paper if there is no interest on the writer.  There should be that "curiousity" to know the answers to the questions that you will be asking related to the topic in order to reach your goal of writing an honest term paper without feeling like you're being punished to do it. Make the research a learning experience that could lead to the possible solution of an age-old problem in your community.

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