Academic
Choosing a topic for writing a
research paper is usually quite hard, but there are some peculiarities which will help you to avoid bad research topics.
While selecting your topic, you’re focused on whether it is interesting for you and informative for an audience, however, some topics should be avoided.
For instance:
- Personal information and stories
- Topics with a lack of approachable information
- Too narrow topics
- Too broad topics
- Controversial topics
Personal information and stories
You cannot write a research paper based on your own biography or stories from your life unless you’re famous, or unless you have at least one book written about you. A research paper requires you to do research, which means that there should be some sources available to use in order to do it properly.
Topics with a lack of approachable information
Just the same as with topics about yourself, you cannot write a topic without any available materials.
If you choose something too specific (e.g. color of Albert Einstein’s socks or what he ate for breakfast) you probably are going to be stuck because of lack or even non-existence of information.
Too narrow topics
Still the same issue. You don’t want to pick a topic which is hard or even impossible to write just because it’s too narrow.
You can easily write about “volcanoes as a future source of energy,” but it will be much harder to write about ‘how deep Vesuvius is and why it is so” because it is way too specific.
Too broad topics
Sometimes, you are drowning in information about your subject, but cannot write anything. Familiar? That’s because there is too much information around, and it’s hard to distinguish the most important.
Free-enterprise system would be a nice topic to pick as a counter to writing about economy in general. Economy is something general and includes a lot of different information and notions to write about.
Controversial Topics
Some topics can offend someone’s feelings, so you should be extremely accurate in picking the right one. For instance, college students are afraid to write about death penalty or abortions, because it may hurt somebody.
Nevertheless, it’s okay to pick a controversial topic, if you are 100% sure that it’s not going to offend anybody.
You can’t just explain your points of view in your research paper, especially if they are controversial. Support your
essay with some research and data and the reader would understand its value, even if their view doesn’t match with one in a research paper.
