How To Set Up A Quality Academic Essay

When you are writing a paper for school and struggling to come up with a topic it is best to take a moment and relax. Many students are so heavily focused on the project and the need to find a topic suitable to the assignment that they fail to realize that ideas for a thesis or topic will come from a variety of sources. These sources might include:

• Staff members
• Other students
• Previous courses
• Past essays
• Media
• Internet searches

If you are writing an argumentative paper then your job is to take one side in a debatable topic that has two or more sides to it and then convince the reader that your side is the best side to take out of all arguments involved. Take a side in the debate about:

• Whether global warming is having an effect on people
• Whether the death penalty is deterring crime
• Whether the election process we have is fair
• Whether torture is ever acceptable
• Whether the lottery is still necessary
• Whether men deserve to take paternity leave in conjunction with maternity leave
• Whether curfews should be used county wide to keep children out of trouble
• Whether cigarettes should be made illegal too
• Whether animals should be used in research
• Whether companies should not be allowed to market to children
• Whether parents should be forced t take parenting classes upon becoming pregnant
• Whether our tax system is fair
• Whether there is too much emphasis placed by colleges on standardized test scores

Write down all of the questions that arise related to your topic and then group these questions together based on the most important to the most trivial and show any relation between the topics. You may need to weed out any questions that overlap or are less relevant. It might also help you to try and answer the questions that you already know so that you can only pursue those to which you have no answer at this stage.

• Is work being done related to your topic currently?
• Can you find any literature that is uniquely related?
• Are certain authors strongly affiliated with your topic?
• Do you know what has already been researched in this area?
• How will you find the research to support your theory?