Learning to Narrow a Topic and Writing a Focused Paper

Jasmine Freeman
Sep 8, 2018 · 3 min read

Consider writing on psychology, French revolution, music, etc. Any students can conclude that writing on any of these topics won’t work. The point is, these are some great subjects, but not great topics to write a well-thought essay.

These are broad topics that need to be concise by picking one of the subtopics, or even a particular aspects to write a strong essay. This is what college students need to learn on how to narrow down a large topic and write a focused paper.

How to Tell a Topic is Too Vast?

If your mind is rampaging through a plethora of options making it difficult for you to find the right starting point, it’s probably because your topic is quite broad. Let’s suppose you want to write about skateboarding. You are to write a 4-page page. But what will you write about?

You might come up with the content on the origination of skateboarding sport, its presence at the X games, its freestyle tricks, accessories, and so on.

Now you should get the point that even a not-so-popular sport like skateboarding will pose some serious mental stress on what to write. This is where you start to narrow down the topic.

Narrowing the Topic

In narrowing a topic the student needs to focus on a particular aspect, component, a specific time period or demographics regarding the subject.

Be specific

When we say be specific, it means you needs to write on any one genre about music such as jazz, country, rap, rock, pop, etc., and not entirely about music. Furthermore, which country, time period, and artists you will cover.

Ask journalists’ questions

In doing so you will be inquiring the who, what, where, when, why and how.

Asking the in and out details will assist you in focusing on the topic and understand different viewpoints. Although filling all the blanks will provide you a bulk of information, but still there is a lot of sorting and decision making to do.

There will be some questions provided in the essay guidelines provided by your teacher. Consider writing an argumentative essay for example, telling readers that how Eminem’s Revival failed to capture the audience and critics is not an argumentative topic. However, you can argue that how Revival is different from the previous albums of Eminem.

Research

Although we have listed research as the 3rd point, it doesn’t indicate that it has to be the last. You might spend ample time researching the topic even before you examine how to focus your topic.

Additionally, researching once to narrow the topic also doesn’t mean that the task is over. There are times when you need to jump back and redefine your topic for better comprehension of your writing.

If you are still confused, you can even ask a professional “buy essay writing services UK based” service provider to help you in this regard.

On the whole, the task of narrowing your topic also depends on the type of essay you want to write. But getting the hold of this technique is essential and can save students loads of time from researching and writing and repeating the topic.

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