Home Guides Choosing and Narrowing Topics General Strategies for Coming Up With Topics

Introduction

A Definition of Topic

Arriving at Topics for Writing Assignments

How Purpose and Audience Affect the Choice of Topics

Choosing Workable Topics

How to Find a Topic

Subjects and Topics

Starting With What You Know

General Strategies for Coming Up With Topics

Strategies for Finding Topics Appropriate to Particular Types of Assignments

Generating More Than One Topic Idea

Narrowing Topics

Moving from Topic to Thesis

Working With Topics in Different Disciplines

Additional Resources

---

Related Resources
Print-Friendly Page
Authors & Contributors

General Strategies for Coming Up With Topics

Before attempting to choose or narrow a topic, you need to have some ideas to choose from. This can be a problem if you are suffering from the "blank page or screen" syndrome, and have not even any initial, general ideas for writing topics.

• Brainstorming
• Freewriting
• Clustering