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Assignment | Argumentative Project (Okai): Picking a Topic

ENGL 1302 | Prof. Maria Okai (Fall 2024)

Research Starters

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

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

Topic - 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.

Brainstorm a Central Topic

Create a mind map to explore your options

Fake news as free speech:

Think of Possible Questions

Identified through topic development/mind map

  • What impact does protecting fake news as free speech have on American policy around the topic of climate change?
  • Can social media be leveraged to fight against fake news?
  • Is fake news inherently tied to the Internet and social media?

Research to Create Thesis Statement

Develop your thesis -- the answer to your question -- through research

Despite the focus on the ills of social media, the phenomenon of fake news can be observed throughout history from medieval distortions of people in foreign lands, to publications during the contentions Adams presidency in the early republic, to the yellow journalism of the 1890s that fomented the Spanish-American War.

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