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Assignment | Argumentative Project (Okai): Picking a Topic

ENGL 1302 | Prof. Maria Okai (Spring 2024)

Research Starters

These collections will give you topic overviews, histories, and viewpoint articles to help you explore the opposition!

Topic, Research Question, Thesis

First, you develop and narrow down your topic -- the general idea of what you're going to be researching. From that, you need to develop your research question, i.e. what is the question you are attempting to answer by doing your research? This, in turn, will form the basis for your paper's thesis (your claim/argument/answer) which you'll explicitly state in your introduction.

From your central topic, you develop your research question(s) to investigate, and then finally develop a thesis statement which answers your chosen question.

Develop Your Thesis

Thesis statements...

  • give a preview of what arguments you'll be making
  • usually one sentence long
  • last sentence of your introduction paragraph

Thesis statements should be:


Specific

lay out exactly the arguments/reasons you're using in your thesis


Contestable

if you can find a definitive yes/no answer within a few minutes of Google searching, it's not arguable enough


Narrow

not about all of [topic], but this little sliver of a [topic] in a particular context


Provable

or at least something you can persuasively argue

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