Defining Your Topic Before You Start Writing

Defining Your Topic Before You Start WritingWhen I first began writing my own research papers, I realized that defining my topic was very important. There is nothing worse than writing a research paper and finding out that your topic doesn't really go with what you were hoping to study. If you don't define your topic before you begin writing, you will run into a problem at the end of the paper that you can't correct.In my initial research paper, I came up with a topic that I thought would be useful for my classes and university. I was going to focus on the history of the Vietnam War and its effects on the United States. Now, I had no experience in this area of history or anything about it. However, I knew enough to write a good definition.A lot of times when writing your research paper for college, you have no idea where you're going with it. It might seem like you're just going to write about an abstract topic, but when you're done writing, you might realize that you can't fit it in to your syllabus. I found this to be the case when I wrote my first research paper. All I could think about was researching and writing about Vietnam. I didn't know if I was supposed to write about the war from the viewpoint of either the North or South Vietnamese, or about the effects on the United States.I decided to use some of my notes to figure out the options for my research paper. I asked around to see what others thought was the best possible topic. My notes were very vague, but I did come up with some potential topics. Of course, none of these made any sense. However, after talking to some people who knew about the topic, I began to develop a different topic.I knew that I didn't need to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to make sure that I was going into the topic with an open mind. My options included some information on the political situation in Vietnam and how it affected the world, how the US fought the war, and the effects on the US citizens. I came up with one of the better topics because I knew the political situation well and I had some knowledge of what the soldiers were doing. I also had a general idea of what they were going through. Now I needed to define the term 'Vietnam War.'After researching, I realized that the term 'Vietnam War' was not a single event, but a term used by the military and later the Americans that became a part of their culture. I realized that there was only one topic for my research paper, but I needed to start thinking outside of the box. I tried to think of all the possible topics for my research paper and the one that stuck out to me was 'The Body Politic in Modern America.'This topic went beyond the Vietnam War and dealt with the fact that Americans are becoming more conservative every day. It talked about the way that our politicians in other countries use political propaganda and the way that the media promotes and attacks different ideologies. I knew that I could include political propaganda and media manipula tion in my topic. Of course, I didn't mention that aspect of the topic in my final paper, but I did do some research and realized that there were some things that I could talk about that could bring up these issues. I went ahead and included some information about that.After I finished writing my research paper, I found myself even more interested in writing my own research papers. As a matter of fact, I am planning on using this same topic in my class in about two years. So my original research paper was actually a success. Just make sure that you know what your topic is before you start writing and you'll never have a problem!