How can you start writing a paper if you don't know anything about your the topic you are writing on? Well this is what this chapter is all about...exploring your topic. One thing you can do to get some information about your topic is to talk to others. Anyone who knows about it or have been in some way affected by it could help you gain insight that you wouldn't necessarily be able to get from any other source. Observations are also a good way to learn about your topic. Depending on your topic you can observe peoples reactions to it and things like that. But the main way to gather information is through different sources such as your library, the news, the internet. However once you start gathering information make sure that you are taking notes on what you find and staying organized so you know where it came from.
The other part to this chapter is focusing on an issue. Identifying different ways to approach your topic is going to be helpful when collecting your information as well. You want to try and find the central concepts, broad themes, and the disagreements to your topic. After finding these things you can start to figure out which issues you are most interested in and begin to get rid of the ones that aren't. A strategy in doing this could be asking some of the same questions I had referred to in an earlier post such as are my readers going to be interested in this issue? does it fit the type of paper I am writing? Etc.
From my experience I have found that this is helpful to lay out the different issues that relate to your topic and evaluate them, because it's easy to stray from your main points and start talking about other issues.
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