It's the little things that help

Chapter four discusses planning and proposing research arguments. The section in this chapter that I enjoyed most was the section on bringing a topic into focus and exploring your knowledge, followed by the limitations of it. This step, called prewriting, comes into play after you have settled on a topic and generated some research questions. Prewriting is writing that leads into the official drafting of a paper. It takes on many forms, such as lists, scribbled notes, informal outlines, and drawings.

Brainstorming is a traditional technique of jotting down a series of related words and phrases on a topic. You should first brainstorm different topic ideas, followed by brainstorming ideas and questions about that topic. After brainstorming, most people find it easiest to use a technique called webbing. Webbing is a graphic organizing technique that builds connections between similar words or ideas. It works best when you want to show a lot of words or ideas and keep them loosely connected.

Following brainstorming, you can now narrow down your topic. The first step in doing so is to write down your topic. After that, you can then work with your topic by asking a pointed question based on close analysis of the text at hand, followed by refining your topic by answering that question. The fourth step is to revise the narrowed topic to be more specific. After revising, you must identify the significant aspects of your topic to explore. The sixth and final step is to use the answers to those questions to focus on your topic.

Choosing a topic is usually one of the hardest parts of writing a paper, and because of that, I think that this chapter will be helpful to its readers.