In chapter 11 of our class textbook, Bedford Book of Genres, different techniques are broken down to highlight the important features that lead towards choosing your topic and correctly structuring your paper. After reading these tips to help improve our writing, I found that one of the sections that was most helpful was how to refine your research question and how to move this particular research question into a proposal for your paper. Anytime that I am assigned big papers such as this upcoming project, I always struggle with choosing a topic that is specific enough for my paper to be focused and informative, but also broad enough to allow for different and important aspects to be connected to my specific topic. This section helped clear this technique up and even answered my question on the difference between formulating a research question to a proposal.
As advised, the book emphasizes that when first creating research questions, you have to start very broad and then later on refining to a specific topic that can be researched further. A way in which I connected with this was kind of like choosing a major. One must start out broad like being interested in studying “Criminology” but then later on branching out a specific work field such as “Minorities, Crime, and Social Policy”. The book shows an example to highlight how one can start off with a very open question such as “what causes diabetes?” and then refining your question to being, “what is the relationship between nutrition and diabetes?” as you further begin to research your question and formulate your interests on the topic and how you want to tackle this question in your paper. As your revised question is reflecting your interests and what you’re learning, you have to make sure that your topic gathers facts and defining terms. What, who, and why questions are a great way to formulate this strong research question. Doing so, your question will invite for a much more complex analysis that requires extensive research and even speculation. If done right, your final research question should look like something such as, “How can changes in your diet help a person manage diabetes?”.
Now that you’ve taken these steps to form a working research question, you have to make sure that your proposal invites and formats for either an argumentative, discursive, or informative text. Your research topic will reflect what kind of paper you are formulating. These tips is an outlined process of what a strong research proposal looks like and remember that using these tips on refining your research topic can completely affect the focus of your paper—drawing the line between a general and simplistic paper versus a focused paper.
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