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7.5: Choosing Your Topic

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• Page ID 219067

• Kathryn Crowther et al.
• Georgia Perimeter College via GALILEO Open Learning Materials

Your first step is to choose a topic and then to develop research questions and a working thesis. It’s important to set aside adequate time for this part of the process. Fully exploring ideas will help you build a solid foundation for your paper.

Identifying Potential Topics

When you choose a topic for a research paper, you are making a major commitment. Your choice will help determine whether you enjoy the lengthy process of research and writing—and whether your final paper fulfills the assignment requirements. If you choose your topic hastily, you may later find it difficult to work with your topic. By taking your time and choosing carefully, you can ensure that this assignment is not only challenging but also rewarding.

Writers understand the importance of choosing a topic that fulfills the assignment requirements and fits the assignment’s purpose and audience. Choosing a topic that genuinely interests you is also crucial. You instructor may provide a list of suggested topics or ask you to develop a topic on your own. You may find inspiration for topic ideas in your everyday life, by browsing magazines, or looking at lists of topics or themes in online databases such Opposing Viewpoints, CQ Researcher Online, Bloom’s Literary Reference Online, and Literature Resource Center. In addition to Prewriting Techniques, use tools on the Web, such as Topic-o-rama and Wridea, to help you brainstorm your topic.

You may benefit from identifying several possibilities before committing to one idea. Building a list of potential topics will help you to identify additional, related topics. In this chapter, you will follow a writer named Jorge, who is studying healthcare administration, as he prepares a research paper. Jorge was assigned to write a research paper on current debates about healthy living for an introductory course in health care. Although a general topic was selected for the students, Jorge had to decide which specific issues interested him. He brainstormed the following list of possibilities:

Example \(\PageIndex{1}\):

• Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) in the news
• Sexual education programs
• Hollywood and eating disorders
• Americans’ access to public health information
• Medial portrayals of health care reform
• Depictions of drugs on television
• The effect of the Internet on mental health
• Popularized diets (such as low-carbohydrate diets)
• Fear of pandemics (bird flu, H1N1, SARS)
• Electronic entertainment and obesity
• Advertisements for prescription drugs
• Public education and disease prevention

Focusing on a Topic

After identifying potential topics, you will need to evaluate your list and choose one topic to pursue as the focus of your research paper. Discussing your ideas with your instructor, peers, and tutors will help ensure that you choose a manageable topic that fits the requirements of the assignment. The following are some questions to consider:

• Will you be able to find enough information about the topic?
• Can you take an arguable position on the topic?
• Is the topic too broad or too narrow for the scope of the assignment? If so, can you modify the topic so it is more manageable?

You will also need to narrow your topic so you can formulate a concise, manageable thesis about it. Most writers find that the topics they listed during brainstorming or idea mapping are broad—too broad for the scope of the assignment. Working with an overly broad topic, such as sexual education programs or popularized diets, can be frustrating and overwhelming. Each topic has so many facets that it would be impossible to cover them all in a college research paper. However, more specific choices, such as the pros and cons of sexual education in kids’ television programs or the physical effects of the South Beach diet, are specific enough to write about without being so narrow that they can’t sustain an entire research paper. A good research paper provides focused, in-depth information and analysis. If your topic is too broad, you will find it difficult to do more than skim the surface when you research it and write about it. To narrow your focus, explore your topic in writing. Also, conduct preliminary research, including discussing the topic with others.

You may be asking yourself, “How am I supposed to narrow my topic when I haven’t even begun researching yet?” In fact, you may already know more than you realize. Review your list and identify your top two or three topics. Set aside some time to explore each one through Prewriting Techniques. Taking the time to focus on your topic may yield fresh angles. For example, Jorge knew that he was especially interested in the topic of diet fads, but he also knew that it was much too broad for his assignment. He used freewriting to explore his thoughts so he could narrow his topic. Read Jorge’s following ideas from freewriting.

Our instructors are always saying that accurate, up-to-date information is crucial in encouraging people to make better choices about their health. I don’t think the media does a very good job of providing that, though. Every time I go on the Internet, I see tons of ads for the latest ‘miracle food’. One week it’s acai berries, the next week it’s green tea, and then six months later I see a news story saying all the fabulous claims about acai berries and green tea are overblown! Advice about weight loss is even worse. Think about all the diet books that are out there! Some say that a low-fat diet is best; some say you should cut down on carbs; and some make bizarre recommendations like eating half a grapefruit with every meal. I don’t know how anybody is supposed to make an informed decision about what to eat when there’s so much confusing, contradictory information. I bet even doctors, nurses, and dieticians have trouble figuring out what information is reliable and what is just the latest hype.

Another way that writers focus on a topic is by conducting preliminary research. Talk about your ideas with your classmates, friends, and family. Like freewriting, exploratory reading can help you identify interesting angles. Surfing the web is a good way to start. Find out what people are saying about your topic in online newspapers, magazines, blogs, and discussion boards. Keep in mind that the reliability of online sources varies greatly. In this exploratory phase of your research, you do not need to evaluate sources as closely as you will later; however, use common sense as you refine your paper topic. If you read a fascinating blog comment that gives you a new idea, search for some fully developed sources on that topic to see if it’s worth pursuing. If you are writing a research paper for a specialized course, look back through your notes and course activities to identify potential topics. Remind yourself of reading assignments and class discussions that especially engaged you. Doing so can help you identify topics to pursue. If the readings or viewings assigned in your course deal with your topic, then review and take notes on those materials. Librarians and instructors can help you to determine if there are enough sources available on your topic, or if there are so many sources that it would be wise to narrow your topic further.

Jorge’s freewriting exercise helped him realize that the assigned topic of current debates about healthy living intersected with a few of his own interests—diet, nutrition, and obesity. Preliminary online research and discussions with his classmates strengthened his impression that many people are confused or misled by media coverage of these subjects. Jorge decided to focus his paper on a topic that had garnered a great deal of media attention—low-carbohydrate diets. He wanted to find out whether low-carbohydrate diets were as effective as their proponents claimed.

Writing at Work

At work, you may need to research a topic quickly to find general information. This information can be useful in understanding trends in a given industry or generating competition. For example, a company may research a competitor’s prices and use the information when pricing their own product. You may find it useful to skim a variety of sources and take notes on your findings.

Set a timer for five minutes. Use prewriting techniques to create a list of topics you would be interested in researching for a paper about the influence of the Internet on social networking. Which social networking sites do you and your friends use? Do you closely follow a particular social media website, such as Twitter? Would you like to learn more about a certain industry, such as online dating? Would you like to learn more about people’s use of the Internet to build support for social causes? List as many ideas related to this topic as you can.

Choose two topics from the list you created above. Spend five minutes freewriting about each of these topics. Choose the topic about which you more enjoyed freewriting. Then, review your freewriting to identify possible areas of focus.

Collaborative exercise: Swap lists of potential topics with a classmate. Select one or two topics on your classmate’s list about which you would like to learn more. Explain to your classmate why you find those topics interesting. Ask your classmate which of the topics on your list s/he would like to learn more about and why.

Determining Paths of Inquiry

Your freewriting and preliminary research have helped you choose a focused, manageable topic for your research paper. To work with your topic successfully, you will need to determine what exactly you want to learn about it—and what you want to say about it. Before you begin conducting in-depth research, you will further define your focus by developing research questions and a working thesis.

By forming research questions about your topic, you are setting a goal for your research. Determine your main question—the primary focus of your paper—and several subquestions that you will need to research in more depth to answer your main question. Your main research question should be substantial enough to form the guiding principle of your paper—but focused enough to guide your research. A strong research question requires you not only to find information but also to put together different pieces of information, interpret and analyze them, and figure out what you think. As you consider potential research questions, ask yourself whether they would be too hard or too easy to answer. Review the results of your prewriting, and skim through your preliminary research. From these, write both simple, factual questions and more complex questions that would require analysis and interpretation to answer.

Below are the research questions Jorge will use to focus his research. Notice that his main research question has no obvious, straightforward answer. Jorge will need to research his subquestions, which address narrower topics, to answer his main question.

Topic : Low-carbohydrate diets

Main question : Are low-carbohydrate diets as effective as they have been portrayed to be by media sources?

Subquestions :

• Who can benefit from following a low-carbohydrate diet?
• What are the supposed advantages to following a low-carbohydrate diet?
• When did low-carbohydrate diets become a ‘hot’ topic in the media?
• Where do average consumers get information about diet and nutrition?
• Why has the low-carb approach received so much media attention?
• How do low-carb diets work?

A working thesis concisely states a writer’s initial answer to the main research question. It does not merely state a fact or present a subjective opinion. Instead, it expresses a debatable idea or claim that you hope to prove through research. Your working thesis is called a working thesis for a reason: it is subject to modification. You may adapt your thinking in light of your research findings. Let your working thesis serve as a guide to your research, but do not hesitate to change your path as you learn about your topic.

One way to determine your working thesis is to consider how you would complete statements that begin, “I believe…” or “My opinion is…”. These first-person phrases are useful starting points even though you may eventually omit them from sentences in your research paper. Generally, formal research papers use an assertive, objective voice and, therefore, do not include first-person pronouns. Some readers associate I with informal, subjective writing. Some readers think the first-person point of view diminishes the impact of a claim. For these reasons, some instructors will tell you not to use I in research papers.

Jorge began his research with a strong point of view based on his preliminary writing and research. Read his working thesis statement, below, which presents the point he will argue. Notice how it states Jorge’s tentative answer to his research question.

Main research question : Are low-carb diets as effective as they have sometimes been portrayed to be by the mass media?

Working thesis statement : Low-carb diets do not live up to the media hype surrounding them.

Before you begin a new project at work, you may have to develop a project summary document that states the purpose of the project, explains why it would be a wise use of company resources, and briefly outlines the steps involved in completing the project. This type of document is similar to a research proposal for an academic purpose. Both define and limit a project, explain its value, discuss how to proceed, and identify what resources you will use.

Using the topic you have selected, write your main research question and at least four subquestions. Check that your main research question is appropriately complex for your assignment.

Write a working thesis statement that presents your preliminary answer to the research question you wrote above. Think about whether your working thesis statement presents an idea or claim that could be supported or refuted by evidence from research.

BUS210: Business Communication

Choosing a topic, learning objective.

• Identify the general purpose and specific purpose of a speech

Now that you have a clear idea of your general and specific purpose, the allotted time, your audience's expectations, and the amount of information available, you are ready to commit to a topic. We have several strategies you can use to help select and narrow the topic appropriately.

Know Yourself and Your Audience

The first strategy is to identify an area of knowledge or an issue that deeply interests you. If you have not already completed the first of the Note 10.1 "Introductory Exercises" for this chapter, please work with it, identifying as many activities, areas of interest, places you've traveled to, and things you find interesting as possible. Once you have completed the exercise, identify three broad subject areas where you have some knowledge or experience and consider at least one link to business and industry for each area. Talking about what you know will make you a more credibility speaker but it must clearly connect with your employer's goals for your presentation. If, for example, you like doing a scrapbook, what kind of glue do you prefer and why? That may make for a natural speech topic that calls on your previous experience while requiring you to learn more about the glue and its properties. You may need to compare and contrast several types of glues as part of your preparation. Your in-depth awareness of scrapbooking and glue as a necessary ingredient will make you a more credible speaker. In the first of the Note 10.1 "Introductory Exercises" for this chapter, you were asked to choose three questions from the list and then survey people you know to find out which of the three they prefer to hear about. Make sure you keep score by writing down factors like age, gender, and any other elements you think your audience may have in common. This exercise serves to reinforce the idea of being audience-centered, or tailoring your message to your specific audience. Our third of the Note 10.1 "Introductory Exercises" for this chapter should highlight that our perception of the world is not always accurate, and there is no substitute for thorough, objective research when preparing a speech. The more you know, about yourself and your audience, the better you can prepare to meet their needs and accomplish your goals as a speaker. You have now utilized the Note 10.1 "Introductory Exercises" to help identify some broad topic areas that might work for you. If you find the topic interesting, your enthusiasm will show and your audience will become interested, too. Next, you will want to decide which of these areas would work best for your speech, and how to narrow it down.

Saving Time

Here are some strategies you can use to save yourself time in selecting a speech topic. First, consider the information you already have close at hand. Do you already have a project you are working on, perhaps in another course? What are you currently studying in your other classes? What topics do you want to know more about? Which issues or aspects initially drew you to this topic or area? Chances are that whatever piqued your interest the first time will also get your audience interested. Next, conduct a search (online, in the library, or interview people you know) in your subject area to get an overview of the subject. Explore topics, issues, places, or people that fascinate you.

Appeal, Appropriateness, and Ability

These are three main factors to consider when choosing a topic. All three factors are related to one another, but by systematically focusing on each one you will help address the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen topic. Appeal involves the attractive power of arousing a sympathetic, stimulated response from the audience. Your audience will have expectations of you as a speaker and of your purpose for speaking. We all tend to seek novelty and find interesting, attractive, or appealing, or something that is not part of everyday life. A good example is the melting ice cream used in the speech on global warming. The elements are nothing new. We've all seen plates, brownies, and ice cream before, but how many of us have seen a speaker use them together to symbolize the melting ice caps associated with global warming? There is an inherent novelty present when we adapt something from its original purpose in order to make it appealing. You will need to consider an appealing way to start your speech, and will look for ways throughout your speech to reaffirm that appeal to the audience. When considering a topic, also think about the visual or auditory images that come to mind, or how you might represent it to an audience in ways other than your words. This can guide you as you proceed to select your topic, thinking about what you can make appealing to your audience. It also follows that appeal applies to the speaker as well as the audience. You may find the prospect of discussing global warming not very interesting, and if you feel this way, it will come through in your speech. You need to be attracted, interested or find your topic appealing in order to convey this appeal to your audience. Find something that catches your interest, and that same spark is what you will cultivate to develop ways to stimulate the spark of curiosity in your audience. Appropriateness involves a topic that is especially suitable or compatible with your audience's interest, expectations, norms, or customs. Everyone will have expectations about roles and outcomes associated with your speech. Some may be looking for information, while others may already know something about your topic and want to learn more. You will need to reach both groups within the audience. As we saw earlier in the Ford Mustang example, a highly technical speech may lose the more novice members of your audience. Appropriateness is important because some topics do not work as well in a classroom setting as others. Will everyone find a new rust treatment product interesting? Will everyone find a car speech interesting? Whether you are in the classroom or business office setting, consider your audience and the appropriateness of your topic. Regardless where you give a speech, you should always choose topics that will not promote harmful or illegal actions. It is also important to consider whether your topic might offend members of the audience. If this is a possibility, can you find a way to present the topic that will minimize offense? Similarly, if your topic is controversial and you know that your audience has strong feelings about it, consider how you can convey your message without alienating or antagonizing your listeners. Finally, it is usually wise to avoid topics, which the audience already knows a lot about. Ability involves the natural aptitude or acquired proficiency to be able to perform. If you have a lot of prior information on flying, gained over years of experience being at the controls of an aircraft, you may have a natural aptitude and knowledge base to use to your advantage. If, however, you've never flown before, you may need to gather information and go visit an airport to be able to approach a proficient level of understanding to discuss the topic. In addition to your ability to draw on your natural strengths, you'll also want to consider your ability to research a topic where you are located. If you want to develop a speech on a particular topic but you find information hard to come by, this will make your job even harder and could possibly have a detrimental impact on your speech. You may find that two similar topics interest you but your ability to gather information from more diverse sources, from places that are more readily available, or from your background and experience make one topic more attractive than the other. Consider topics that are,

• possibly controversial,
• supported by information you can find in outside sources,
• interesting to you.

Individual course guidelines vary, so make sure that your instructor approves your topic, and that your topic is appropriate for your audience. At some colleges and universities, broad topics are designated as part of the curriculum including, for example, environment, diversity, and technology. In your class, you may be challenged to link any of those topics to business, and to prepare an informative or persuasive speech. Some colleges and university instructors may also encourage you not to choose topics that have been done repeatedly over the years, like abortion or the death penalty, unless you can connect the issue to a current event or new perspective. Don't avoid all controversial topics, as they often intrigue your audience and help maintain interest. Just make sure to consider the pre-existing attitudes of your audience when attempting to create an effective, engaging speech. In a business setting, you will rarely be given complete freedom to choose your topic. You may even have a script and visual aids prepared in advance. In the real world the luxury of time for preparation and topic selection are rare, but in a classroom setting you are often given more of an opportunity to choose. That choice should not be taken lightly, and should be viewed as an opportunity. The classroom is a training ground, and your freedom to explore and experiment is designed to build skills and strengths. When you join an employer, you will be asked to prepare a presentation as part of the job; more often than not, there are clear guidelines on what is acceptable and your professionalism is expected.

Use Your Self-Inventory

Choosing a topic can be difficult, but your self-inventory of things you already know should get you started. By doing a little exploring, you can often help yourself come up with several possible topics. The topic itself will not exclusively make a "good" or "bad" speech. How you develop that topic and discuss its points and issues, however, will make a significant impact. Before moving on to the next step in this chapter, make sure you have a topic in which you are relatively confident. If you have trouble selecting a topic, take your self-inventory to your instructor or librarian. They may be able to help guide you to a topic that works for you. Here are some examples to get you started. Let's say your self-inventory response from the first of the Note 10.1 "Introductory Exercises" for this chapter to the question, " What do you play or do for fun ?" is to play sports, and it also happens to be one way you are earning your way through school on a scholarship. You could consider a topic like the history of your sport for an informative speech, or how to tell the difference between three classic types of pitches in baseball, and which you can involve an audience member for a demonstrative speech. You could also consider stereotypes of athletes in college and some of the common misperceptions and persuade the audience that athletes often handle the issues of time management well, can get good grades (provide statistics as evidence and ask a coach for examples), and are actively developing both their minds and their bodies through participation in sports. You might even take on a topic of why basketball is more interesting than football, or vice versa. You might decide instead to entertain the audience, and tell stories associated with game travel, buses breaking down, or road trips gone bad. Finally, you might put together a ceremonial speech honoring an Academic All-American player, recognizing his or her excellence both in academics and in athletics. If you are not a student athlete, but a college student, you may have answered that same question by indicating you are taking classes for a degree as well as for fun. You could put together an informative speech on the steps involved in applying for financial aid, or produce a demonstrative speech on how to gather the information required and complete the application process. You might persuade the audience to apply for financial aid, even if they think they might not be eligible, and cover the options within the program. You might entertain the audience with funny stories about the challenges of registering for classes, completing financial aid, and completing the classes you need to graduate. (There is always just one more class, right?) You might also draft a ceremonial speech as if you were presenting the commencement speech at your graduation. These two scenarios should stimulate some ideas, or you might already have a clear purpose and topic in mind. It's important to be clear on both your purpose and your topic as you begin to put pencil to paper, or keystroke to computer, and begin the process of writing your general purpose and thesis statements.

Writing Your Thesis Statement

Earlier in the chapter you wrote a statement expressing the general and specific purpose of your speech. Now that you have explored further and identified a definite topic, it's time to write a thesis statement . This thesis statement should be a short, specific sentence capturing the central idea of your speech. Steven Beebe and Susan Beebe recommend five guiding principles when considering your thesis statement. The thesis statement should

• be a declarative statement;
• be a complete sentence;
• use specific language, not vague generalities;
• be a single idea;
• reflect consideration of the audience.

For example, if you plan to inform a general audience about the Ford Mustang, a good thesis statement might be, "Ford produced five ‘generations' of the Mustang, each with a distinctive body style that audience members can learn to recognize". If you plan to persuade a group of investors that a beachfront property could be threatened by rising sea levels, a good thesis statement might be, "Sea levels are predicted to rise because of global warming, and if these predictions are correct, the beachfront property my audience is considering investing in may be threatened". The thesis statement is key to the success of your speech. If your audience has to work to find out what exactly you are talking about, or what your stated purpose or goal is, they will be less likely to listen, be impacted, or recall your speech. By stating your point clearly in your introduction, and then referring back to it during your speech, you promote the cognitive strategies of emphasis, clarity, and conciseness, and help your audience to listen while meeting the expectations of the rhetorical context.

Key Takeaway

Choosing a speech topic involves knowing yourself and your audience; using efficient strategies; and understanding appeal, appropriateness, and ability. When you have accomplished these steps, you will be able to write a good thesis statement.

• Which of the following qualify as good thesis statements? Take any that are faulty and rewrite them to remedy their weaknesses. a. Living in the desert as we do, my listeners and I can grow many beautiful and interesting plants in our gardens without using large amounts of water. b. To inform patients about how the medical insurance claims process works. c. Because recent research suggests children develop positive self-esteem through recognition for their achievements, not from indiscriminate praise, I will persuade the parents and teachers in my audience to modify their behavior toward children. d. Tourists can learn a lot from visiting the European battlefields of World War II, and unexploded land mines from past wars are a serious problem throughout the world. e. As a student attending this college on an athletic scholarship, I lead a very busy life because I am responsible for working hard at my sport as well as being held to the same academic standards as the nonathlete students in my audience. Answers: Examples a, c, and e are good thesis statements. Example b is not a complete sentence. Example d contains more than one main idea.
• From your list of possible topics, write several sample purpose or thesis statements. Share and compare your results with classmates.
• Write a general purpose statement and thesis statement for a speech to inform. Now adapt these statements for a speech to persuade.

University Libraries

Writing a dissertation or thesis proposal.

• Introduction
• Video Tutorials

How to Select a Topic

Refine your topic.

• Research Questions
• Search the Literature
• Plan Before Reviewing
• Review the Literature
• Write the Review
• IRB Approval

Here are some suggestions to find a topic for your dissertation or thesis proposal:

• Scan academic journals for recent research trends
• Monitor professional blogs and listservs for hot topics
• Attend conferences to learn about current research
• Talk to classmates, colleagues, and professors about your ideas to help focus them. Even an interested friend outside the field can help you clarify your topic and why it's important.

The Libraries' Subject Guides are a good place to find information about journals and professional organizations in your field. Use the Course Guides or Subject Guides menu to find the material that interests you.

Perhaps the most important point is to select a topic you find fascinating because you will be living with it for months or years!

You will need to do some initial literature searching and reading on your potential topic for two reasons:

• to clarify and solidify your research question because you can't test a vague research question
• to determine if your question and research will be original

The next tab, Search the Literature, covers where and how to search. While doing your initial search, be looking for the niche where you can do your research:

• gaps in the knowledge on a subject area
• questions about your topic that remain unanswered
• areas of disagreement in your subject area that need to be settled 

After you've refined your topic, then you can go back and do further searching to find the most relevant sources for your research question, which you'll want to discuss in the literature review. Referring to the Literature Review Process image below, you are going to make a feedback loop between Select a Topic and Search the Literature. An initial, broad search will define your topic and then a second, narrower search will identify the sources most relevant to your refined topic.

Even in this initial searching, it's important to keep track of what you read and which articles are important in defining your topic. A bibliographic management software is an excellent tool for managing the literature. The UNT Libraries make RefWorks available to all UNT students, staff, and faculty, and its advantage is you have already paid for it through library fees. Zotero  and Mendeley are free web-based reference managers you may want to explore; you will have to purchase software/online access for other reference managers, e.g., EndNote , 

Need help? Then use the library's  Ask Us service. Get help from real people face-to-face, by phone, or by email.

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Research Basics

Develop a Thesis Statement

Now that you've learned about your topic through background research and developed your topic into a research question, you can formulate a solid thesis statement. The thesis statement can be looked at as the answer to your research question. It guides the focus of your research and the direction of your arguments, and also prevents any unnecessary tangents within your project. A strong thesis statement will always make it easier to maintain a clear direction while conducting your information search.

Thesis statements are one sentence long and are focused, clear, declarative, and written in third person voice. Read the sections below for more information and view examples.

Focus on a single position or point of view in your thesis statement. You cannot effectively address multiple perspectives within a single paper, as you want to make coherent points to support your position.

Weak Thesis: Underfunded arts programs, underpaid teachers, and standardized testing are all factors in underachieving students in public schools.

Stronger Thesis: The emphasis on standardized testing is a critical factor in the underperformance of public school students.

Present your argument or position clearly and precisely. A clear thesis statement will avoid generalizations and make your position known.

Weak Thesis: The lack of funding in public schools is a major issue in the American education system.

Stronger Thesis: Underfunding arts programs in public schools does not adequately prepare students for college.

3. Declarative

Present your position or point of view as a statement or declarative sentence. Your research question helped guide your initial searching so you could learn more about your topic. Now that you have completed that step, you can extract a thesis statement based on the research you have discovered.

Weak Thesis: Does car exhaust impact climate change?

Stronger Thesis: Car exhaust is a leading contributor to climate change.

4. Third Person

Write your thesis statement in third person voice. Rather than addressing "I," "we," "you," "my," or "our" in your thesis, look at the larger issues that affect a greater number of participants. Think in terms like "citizens," "students," "artists," "teachers," "researchers," etc.

Weak Thesis: I think using your cell phone while driving is the leading cause of traffic deaths for people in my age group.

Stronger Thesis: Cell phone use is the leading cause of traffic deaths in teenagers.

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Research Foundations: Develop a Thesis Statement

• Information Literacy
• The Information Timeline
• Popular, Scholarly, & Trade Publications
• Primary, Secondary, & Tertiary Materials
• Information Formats
• Evaluate Information
• Chapter 1 Self Quiz
• The Pre-Research Process
• Decide on a Topic
• Find Background Information
• Refine Your Topic
• Develop a Thesis Statement
• Choose Keywords
• Create Search Statements
• Chapter 2 Self Quiz
• Search the Library Catalog
• Call Numbers
• Request Books
• Book Research Streamlined
• Viewing eBooks
• Access Media
• Chapter 3 Self Quiz
• About Library Databases
• Find Articles in Databases
• Modify Your Search
• Reading Scholarly Articles
• Chapter 4 Self Quiz
• Citation Styles
• Locate Citation Information
• Copyright & Fair Use
• Creative Commons
• Find & Attribute Images
• Chapter 5 Self Quiz

Developing a Thesis Statement

Now that you've learned about your topic through background research and developed your topic into a research question, you can formulate a solid thesis statement . The thesis statement can be looked at as the answer to your research question. It guides the focus of your research and the direction of your arguments, and also prevents any unnecessary tangents within your project. A strong thesis statement will always make it easier to maintain a clear direction while conducting your information search.

Thesis statements are one sentence long and are focused, clear, declarative, and written in third person voice. Read the sections below for more information and view examples.

Focus on a single position or point of view in your thesis statement.  You cannot effectively address multiple perspectives within a single paper, as you want to make coherent points to support your position.

Weak Thesis: Underfunded arts programs, underpaid teachers, and standardized testing are all factors in underachieving students in public schools.

Stronger Thesis: The emphasis on standardized testing is a critical factor in the underperformance of public school students.

Present your argument or position clearly and precisely. A clear thesis statement will avoid generalizations and make your position known.

Weak Thesis: The lack of funding in public schools is a major issue in the American education system.

Stronger Thesis: Underfunding arts programs in public schools does not adequately prepare students for college.

3. Declarative

Present your position or point of view as a statement or declarative sentence. Your research question helped guide your initial searching so you could learn more about your topic. Now that you have completed that step, you can extract a thesis statement based on the research you have discovered.

Weak Thesis: Does car exhaust impact climate change?

Stronger Thesis: Car exhaust is a leading contributor to climate change.

4. Third Person

Write your thesis statement in third person voice. Rather than addressing "I," "we," "you," "my," or "our" in your thesis, look at the larger issues that affect a greater number of participants. Think in terms like "citizens," "students," "artists," "teachers," "researchers," etc.

Weak Thesis: I think using your cell phone while driving is the leading cause of traffic deaths for people in my age group.

Stronger Thesis: Cell phone use is the leading cause of traffic deaths in teenagers.

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Choosing and Refining Topics

When we are given a choice of topics to write on, or are asked to come up with our own topic ideas, we must always make choices that appeal to our own interests, curiosity, and current knowledge. If you decided to write an essay on the Affordable Care Act, for instance, you should make that decision because you are either interested in the issue, know something about it already, and/or would like to know more about it. However, because we rarely write solely for our own satisfaction, we must consider matters other than our own interests as we choose topics. You don’t always have to say something completely new and novel, but you do need a topic you can be confident about supporting, arguing, and researching on. Both interest and expandability are key factors in such a topic.

A Definition of a Topic

Arriving at topics for writing assignments.

In academic writing, topics are sometimes dictated by the task at hand. Consider, for example, that you must conduct a lab experiment before you can sit down to write a report. Or perhaps you have to run a statistical program to get your data. In these situations, your topic is determined for you: You will write about the results of the work you have completed. Likewise, your instructor may simply hand you a topic to explore or to research. In these situations, you are delivered from both the responsibility and the rewards of choosing your own topic, and your task is to try to develop an interest in what you have been given to write about.

More often, however, you will have a bit more leeway in choosing topics of your own. Sometimes you will be asked to find a topic of interest to you that is grounded in ideas developed in shared class readings and discussions. Other times, your assignment will be anchored even less, and you will be responsible for finding a topic all on your own. Many students find that the more freedom they are given to pursue their own interests, the more intimidated they are by this freedom, and the less certain they are of what really is interesting to them. But writing assignments with open topic options can be excellent opportunities either to explore and research issues that are already concerns for you (and which may even have been topics of earlier writing) or to examine new interests. A well chosen writing topic can lead to the types of research questions that fuel your academic interests for years to come. At the very least, though, topics can be seen as occasions for making your writing relevant and meaningful to your own personal and academic concerns.

How Purpose and Audience Affect the Choice of Topics

Before choosing and narrowing a topic to write about, consider why you are writing and who will read what you write. Your writing purpose and audience often dictate the types of topics that are available to you. (See our guide on ‘ Adapting to your Audience ’ for more detailed information about writing for specific audiences.)

In the workplace, purpose and audience are often defined for you. For instance, you might have to write a memo to a co-worker explaining why a decision was made or compose a letter to a client arguing why the company cannot replace a product. In either case, your purpose and audience are obvious, and your topic is equally evident. As a student, you may have to work a little harder to determine which topics are appropriate for particular purposes and audiences.

Oftentimes, the wording of your assignment sheet will offer clues as to the reasons why you are writing and the audience you are expected to address. Sometimes, when assignment sheets are unclear or when you misunderstand what is expected of you, you will need either to ask your instructor about purpose and audience or to make your own educated guess. However you arrive at the purpose and the audience of your writing, it is important to take these elements into consideration, since they help you to choose and narrow your topic appropriately.

Interpreting the Assignment

Steve Reid, English Professor It's important to circle an assignment's key words and then ask the instructor to clarify what these words mean. Every teacher has a different vocabulary. My students always ask me what I'm looking for when I give an assignment. As a writer, you need to know what the words mean in your field and what they mean to your instructor. Specific information about what’s expected for any given assignment can be ascertained through class discussion and directed research.

Many times, an assignment sheet or verbal assignment given by an instructor will reveal exactly what you are being asked to do. The first step in reviewing an assignment sheet is to circle key words or verbs, such as "explain," "describe," or "evaluate." Then, once you've identified these words, make sure you understand what your instructor means by them. For example, suppose your instructor asks you to describe the events leading up to World War II. This could mean explaining how the events prior to World War II helped bring about the beginning of the war, or list every possible cause you think led to the war, or describe and analyze the events. Inquiring before you start writing can help you determine your writing purpose and the expectations of your intended audience (usually your instructor).

How Purpose Affects Topics

Your purpose helps you to narrow a topic, since it demands particular approaches to a general subject. For example, if you're writing about how state policy affects foreign language study in grades K-12 in Oregon, you could have several different purposes. You may need to explain how the Oregon law came about; that is, what influenced it and who was responsible. Or perhaps you would need to explain the law's effects, how curriculum will be altered, etc. Another purpose might be to evaluate the law and to propose changes. Whatever purpose you decide to adopt will determine the questions which give direction to your topic, and (in the case of a research paper) will suggest the type of information you will need to gather in order to address those questions.

How Audience Affects Topics

Steve Reid, English Professor You have to be careful so your topic is not too narrow for your audience. You don't want readers to say, " Well, so what? I couldn't care less." One of the most important roles a topic plays is impacting an audience. If your topic gets too narrow and too focused, it can become too academic or too pedantic. For example, every year at graduation, I watch people laugh when they hear the title of a thesis or dissertation. The students who wrote these documents were very narrowed and focused, but their audiences were very restricted.

Having a clear idea of the audience to whom you are writing will help you to determine an appropriate topic and how to present it. For example, if you're writing about how state policy affects foreign language study in grades K-12 in Oregon, you could have many different audiences. You could be writing for teachers, administrators at a specific school, students whose educational program will be affected by the law, or even the PTA. All of these audiences care about the topic since they are all affected by it. However, for each of them you may need to provide different information and address slightly different questions about this topic. Teachers would want to know why the policy was created and how it will affect what goes on in their classrooms. Parents will want to know what languages their children will be taught and why. Administrators will want to know how this will change the curriculum and what work will be required of them as a result. Knowing your audience requires you to adapt and limit your topic so that you are presenting information appropriate to a specific group of interested readers.

Choosing Workable Topics

Most writers in the workplace don't have to think about what's workable and what's not when they write. Writing topics make themselves obvious in such situations, being the necessary outcome of particular processes. For example, meetings inspire memos and minutes; research produces reports; interactions with customers result in letters. As a student writer, your task is often more difficult than this, since topics do not always "find you" this easily.

Finding and selecting topics are oftentimes arduous tasks for the writer. Sometimes you will find yourself facing the "blank page" or "empty screen" dilemma, lacking topic ideas entirely. Other times you will have difficulties making your ideas fit a particular assignment you have been given. This section on "Choosing a Workable Topic" addresses both of these problems, offering both general strategies for generating topic ideas and strategies for finding topics appropriate to particular types of writing assignments that students frequently encounter.

How to Find a Topic

Don Zimmerman, Journalism and Technical Communication Professor I look at topics from a problem solving perspective and scientific method. Topics emerge from writers working on the job when they're in the profession, following major trends, developments, issues, etc. From the scientific perspective, topics emerge based on solid literature reviews and developing an understanding of the paradigm. From these then come the specific problems/topics/subjects that professionals or scientists address. Writers generate topics from their professional expertise, their understanding of the issues in their respective disciplines, and their understanding of the science that has gone before them.

While your first impulse may be to dash off to the library to dig through books and journals once you've received an assignment, you might also consider other information sources available to you.

Related Information: Making Use of Computer Sources

One hugely valuable source of topic ideas is obviously the Internet. Many sites can provide you with current perspectives on a subject and can lead you to other relevant sites. You can also find and join forums and groups where your general subject or topic is discussed daily (such as Reddit). This will allow you to ask questions of experts, as well as to read what issues are currently important. Massive scholarly databases, such as Google Scholar and JSTOR, can also help provide more reputable sources for research.

Related Information: Making Use of Library Sources

It is always helpful, particularly in the case of writing assignments which demand research, to visit the library and talk to a reference librarian when generating topic ideas. This way, you not only get to discuss your topic ideas with another expert, but you will also have more resources pointed out to you. There is usually a wealth of journals, reference books, and online resources related to your topic area(s) that you may not even know exist. An expert at the library may have better knowledge of specialized sources which you may not be able to access through Google Scholar or JSTOR.

Related Information: Talking to Others Around You

The people around you are often some of the best sources of information available to you. It is always valuable to talk informally about your assignment and any topic ideas you have with classmates, friends, family, tutors, professionals in the field, or any other interested and/or knowledgeable people. Remember, too, that a topic is not a surprise gift that must be kept from your instructor until you hand in your paper. Instructors are almost always happy to discuss potential topics with a student once he or she has an idea or two, and getting response to your work early in the writing process whenever possible is a good plan. Discussing your topic ideas in these ways may lead you to other ideas, and eventually to a well-defined topic.

Subjects and Topics

Most topic searches start with a subject. For example, you're interested in writing about languages, and even more specifically, foreign languages. This is a general subject. Within a general subject, you'll find millions of topics. Not only about every foreign language ever spoken, but also about hundreds of issues affecting foreign languages. But keep in mind that a subject search is always a good place to start.

Every time you use Google or another search engine, or even SAGE at the CSU library, you conduct a subject search. These search devices allow you to review many topics within a broad subject area. While it's beneficial to conduct subject searches, because you never know what valuable information you'll uncover, a subject always needs to be narrowed to a specific topic. This way, you can avoid writing a lengthy book and focus instead on the short research paper you've been assigned.

Starting With What You Know

Kate Kiefer, English Professor Most often the occasion dictates the topic for the writing done outside academe. But as a writer in school, you do sometimes have to generate topics. If you need help determining a topic, create an authority list of things you have some expertise in or a general list of areas you know something about and are interested in. Then, you can make this list more specific by considering how much you know and care about these ideas and what the target audience is probably interested in reading about.

In looking for writing topics, the logical first step is to consider issues or subjects which have concerned you in the past, either on the basis of life experience or prior writing/research. If you are a journal writer, look to your journal for ideas. If not, think about writing you have done for other writing assignments or for other classes. Though it is obviously not acceptable to recycle old essays you have written before, it is more than acceptable (even advisable) to return to and to extend topics you have written about in the past. Returning to the issues that concern you perennially is ultimately what good scholarship is all about.

Related Information: Choosing Topics You Want to Know More About

Even though your personal experience and prior knowledge are good places to start when looking for writing topics, it is important not to rule out those topics about which you know very little, and would like to know more. A writing assignment can be an excellent opportunity to explore a topic you have been wanting to know more about, even if you don't have a strong base knowledge to begin with. This type of topic would, of course, require more research and investigation initially, but it would also have the benefit of being compelling to you by virtue of its "newness."

Related Information: How to Pull Topics from Your Personal Experience

It is a good idea to think about how elements of your own life experience and environment could serve as topics for writing, even if you have never thought of them in that way. Think about the topics of recent conversations you have had, events in your life that are significant to you, problems in your workplace, family issues, matters having to do with college or campus life, or current events that evoke response from you. Taking a close look at the issues in your immediate environment is a good place to start in writing, even if those issues seem to you at first to be unworthy of your writing focus. Not all writing assignments have a personal dimension, but our interests and concerns are always, at their roots, personal.

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

As writers, some of our best ideas occur to us when we are thinking in a very informal, uninhibited way. Though we often think of brainstorming as a way for groups to come up with ideas, it is a strategy that individual writers can make use of as well. Simply put, brainstorming is the process of listing rough thoughts (in any form they occur to you: words, phrases, or complete sentences) that are connected (even remotely) to the writing assignment you have before you or the subject area you already have in mind. Brainstorming works best when you give yourself a set amount of time (perhaps five or ten minutes), writing down anything that comes to mind within that period of time, and resisting the temptation to criticize or polish your own ideas as they hit the page. There is time for examination and polishing when the five or ten minutes are over.

Freewriting

Freewriting is a technique much like brainstorming, only the ideas generated are written down in paragraph rather than list form. When you freewrite, you allow yourself a set amount of time (perhaps five or ten minutes), and you write down any and every idea that comes to mind as if you are writing a timed essay. However, your freewrite is unlikely to read like an organized essay. In fact, it shouldn't read that way. What is most important about freewriting is that you write continuously, not stopping to check your spelling, to find the right word, or even to think about how your ideas are fitting together. If you are unable to think of something to write, simply jot out, "I can't think of anything to write now," and go on. At the end of your five or ten minutes, reread what you have written, ignore everything that seems unimportant or ridiculous, and give attention to whatever ideas you think are worth pursuing. If you are able to avoid checking yourself while you are writing for that short time, you will probably be surprised at the number of ideas that you already have.

Clustering is a way of visually "mapping" your ideas on paper. It is a technique which works well for people who are able to best understand relationships between ideas by seeing the way they play themselves out spatially. (If you prefer reading maps to reading written directions, clustering may be the strategy for you.) Unlike formal outlining, which tends to be very linear, clustering allows you to explore the way ideas sprawl in different directions. When one thought leads to another, you can place that idea on the "map" in its appropriate place. And if you want to change its position later, and connect it with another idea, you can do so. (It is always a good idea to use a pencil rather than a pen for clustering, for this very reason.)

This is a good strategy not only for generating ideas, but also for determining how much you have to say about a topic (or topics), and how related or scattered your ideas are.

Related Information: Example of Brainstorming

Ideas on a Current Issue:

• multiculturalism
• training of teachers
• teaching strategies
• cultural difference in the classroom
• teaching multicultural texts
• language issues
• English only
• assimilation, checking cultural identity at the door
• home language/dialect as intentionally different from school language
• How many languages can we teach? (How multi-lingual must teachers be?)
• Is standard English really "standard"?
• success in school
• statistics on students who speak "non-English" languages or established dialects
• the difference between a dialect and a language
• Ebonics v. bi-lingual education

Related Information: Example of Freewriting

Problem: Development of Small Towns in the Rocky Mountain Region

When I grew up in Anyoldtown, New Mexico, it was a small town in the smallest sense: no movie theaters, no supermarkets, nothing. We had to go into town for the things we needed. Land sold for $2000 an acre. Now it sells for about $50,000 an acre. Anyoldtown was also primarily hispanic, and the families who lived there had very little. Now the people who live there are mostly white and almost exclusively professionals: doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and an endless number of people who have money that seems to have come from nowhere. There are good things to be had there now: good restaurants, good coffee, and all the other things that come along with Yuppie invasion. But those things were had at quite a cost. People who used to live in Anyoldtown when I was a kid can no longer afford to pay property taxes. I can't think of anything else to write now. Oh, yes...these people made a killing off the sale of their land and properties, but they had to give up the places they had lived all their lives. However, by the time they sold, Anyoldtown was no longer the place where they had lived all their lives anyway.

Strategies for Finding Topics Appropriate to Particular Types of Assignments

Sometimes your ways of generating topics will depend on the type of writing assignment you have been given. Here are some ideas of strategies you can use in finding topics for some of the more common types of writing assignments:

Essays Based on Personal Experience

Essays responding to or interpreting texts.

• Essays in Which You Take a Position on an Issue (Argument)

Essays Requiring Research

Essays in which you evaluate, essays in which you propose solutions to problems.

The great challenge of using personal experience in essays is trying to remember the kinds of significant events, places, people, or objects that would prove to be interesting and appropriate topics for writing. Brainstorming, freewriting, or clustering ideas in particular ways can give you a starting point.

Here are a few ways that you might trigger your memory:

Interview people you've known for a long time.Family members, friends, and other significant people in your life can remember important details and events that you haven't thought about for years.

Try to remember events from a particular time in your life. Old yearbooks, journals, and newspapers and magazines can help to trigger some of these memories.

Think about times of particular fulfillment or adversity. These "extremes" in your experience are often easily recalled and productively discussed. When have you had to make difficult choices, for instance? When have you undergone ethical struggles? When have you felt most successful?

Think about the groups you have encountered at various times in your life. When have you felt most like you belonged to or were excluded from groups of people: your family, cliques in school, clubs, "tracked" groups in elementary school, religious groups, or any other community/organization you have had contact with?

Think about the people or events that "changed your life." What are the forces that have most significantly influenced and shaped you? What are the circumstances surrounding academic, career, or relationship choices that you have made? What changes have you dealt with that have been most painful or most satisfying?

Try to remember any "firsts" in your experience.What was your first day of high school like? What was it like to travel far from home for the first time? What was your first hobby or interest as a child? What was the first book you checked out of the library? These "firsts," when you are able to remember them, can prove to have tremendous significance.

One word of caution on writing about personal experience: Keep in mind that any essay you write for a class will most likely be read by others, and will probably be evaluated on criteria other than your topic's importance to you. Never feel like you need to "confess," dredge up painful memories, or tell stories that are uncomfortable to you in academic writing. Save these topics for your own personal journal unless you are certain that you are able to distance yourself from them enough to handle the response that comes from instructors (and sometimes from peers).

Students are often asked to respond to or interpret essays, articles, books, stories, poems, and a variety of other texts. Sometimes your instructor will ask you to respond to one particular reading, other times you will have a choice of class readings, and still other times you will need to choose a reading on your own.

If you are given a choice of texts to respond to or to interpret, it is a good idea to choose one which is complex enough to hold your interest in the process of careful examination. It is not necessarily a problem if you do not completely understand a text on first reading it. What matters is that it challenges, intrigues, and/or evokes response from you in some way.

Related Information: Writing in the Margins of Texts

Many of us were told at some point in our schooling never to write in books. This makes sense in the case of books which don't belong to us (like library books or the dusty, tattered, thirty year-old copies of Hamlet distributed to us in high school). But in the case of books and photocopies which we have made on our own, writing in the margins can be one of the most productive ways to begin the writing process.

As you read, it is a good idea to make a habit of annotating , or writing notes in the margins. Your notes could indicate places in the text which remind you of experiences you have had or of other texts you have read. They could point out questions that you have, points of agreement or disagreement, or moments of complete confusion. Annotations begin a dialogue between you and the text you have before you, documenting your first (and later) responses, and they are valuable when you attempt at a later time to write about that text in a particular way.

Essays in Which You Take a Position on an Issue

One of the most common writing assignments given is some variation on the Arguing Essay, in which students are asked to take a position on a controversial issue. There are two challenges involved in finding topics for argument. One challenge is identifying a topic that you are truly interested in and concerned about, enough so that whatever research is required will be engrossing (or at the very least, tolerable), and not a tedious, painful ordeal. In other words, you want to try to avoid arriving at the "So what?" point with your own topic. The other challenge is in making sure that your audience doesn't respond, "So what?" in reading your approach to your topic. You can avoid this by making sure that the questions you are asking and addressing are current and interesting.

Related Information: Examining Social Phenomena and Trends

In The St. Martin's Guide to Writing , Third Edition, Rise B. Axelrod and Charles R. Cooper discuss the importance of looking toward social phenomena and trends for sources of argument topics. A phenomenon , they explain, is "something notable about the human condition or the social order" (314). A few of the examples of phenomena that they list are difficulties with parking on college campuses, negative campaigning in politics, popular artistic or musical styles, and company loyalty. A trend , on the other hand, is "a significant change extending over many months or years" (314). Some trends they list are the decline of Communism, diminishing concern over world hunger, increased practice of homeschooling, and increased legitimacy of pop art. Trying to think in terms of incidental, current social phenomena or long-term, gradual social trends is a good way of arriving at workable topics for essays requiring you to take a position.

Related Information: Making Sure Your Approach to Your Topic is Current and Interesting

In choosing a topic for an arguing essay, it is important to get a handle not only on what is currently being debated, but how it is being debated. In other words, it is necessary to learn what questions are currently being asked about certain topics and why. In order to avoid the "so what" dilemma, you want to approach your topic in a way that is not simplistic, tired, outdated, or redundant. For example, if you are looking at the relationship of children to television, you probably would want to avoid a topic like "the effects of t.v. violence on children" (which has been beaten to death over the years) in favor of a topic like "different toy marketing strategies for young male v.s. female viewers of Saturday morning cartoons" (a topic that seems at least a bit more original).

As a student writer, you are usually not asked to break absolutely new ground on a topic during your college career. However, you are expected to try to find ground that is less rather than more trampled when finding and approaching writing topics.

Trying to think in terms of incidental, current social phenomena or long-term, gradual social trends is a good way of arriving at workable topics for essays requiring you to take a position.

Related Information: Sources of Topics

Looking to Your Own Writing

When trying to rediscover the issues which have concerned you in the past, go back to journal entries (if you are a journal writer) or essays that you have written before. As you look through this formal and informal writing, consider whether or not these issues still concern you, and what (specifically) you now have to say about them. Are these matters which would concern readers other than yourself, or are they too specific to your own life to be interesting and controversial to a reading audience? Is there a way to give a "larger" significance to matters of personal concern? For example, if you wrote in your journal that you were unhappy with a particular professor's outdated teaching methods, could you turn that idea into a discussion of the downfalls of the tenure system? If you were frustrated with the way that your anthropology instructor dismissed your comment about the ways that "primitive" women are discussed, could you think of that problem in terms of larger gender issues? Sometimes your frustrations and mental conflicts are simply your own gripes, but more often than not they can be linked with current and widely debated issues.

Looking to Your Other Classes

When given an assignment which asks you to work with a controversial issue, always try to brainstorm points of controversy that you recall from current or past courses. What are people arguing about in the various disciplines? Sometimes these issues will seem irrelevant because they appear only to belong to those other disciplines, but there are oftentimes connections that can be made. For example, perhaps you have been asked in a communications class to write an essay on a language issue. You might remember that in a class on information systems, your class debated whether or not Internet news groups are truly diverse or not. You might begin to think about the reasons why news groups are (or aren't) diverse, thinking about the way that language is used. Consider sources that contain one narrative as well as those with a multitude of voices and perspectives, as they will each provide different types of information on your topic.

Reading Newspapers and Magazines

If you are not already an avid newspaper and magazine reader, become one for a week. Pore over the different sections: news, editorials, sports, and even cartoons. Look for items that connect with your own life experiences, and pay attention to those which evoke some strong response from you for one reason or another. Even if an issue that you discover in a newspaper or magazine doesn't prove to be a workable topic, it might lead you to other topic ideas.

Interviewing the People Around You

If you are at a loss to find an issue that lights a fire under you, determine what fires up your friends, family members, and classmates. Think back to heated conversations you have had at the dinner table, or conduct interviews in which you ask the people around you what issues impact their lives most directly. Because you share many experiences and contexts with these people, it is likely that at least some of the issues that concern them will also concern you.

Using the Internet

It is useful to browse the Internet for current, controversial issues. Spend some time surfing aimlessly, or wander through forums and subreddits to see what’s being discussed. Using the Internet can be one of the best ways to determine what is immediately and significantly controversial/relevant.

Although some essays that students are asked to write are to be based solely on their own thoughts and experience, oftentimes (particularly in upper level courses) writing assignments require research. When scoping out possible research topics, it is important to remember to choose a topic which will sustain your interest throughout the research and writing process. The best research topics are those which are complex enough that they offer opportunities for various research questions. You want to avoid choosing a topic that could bore you easily, or that is easily researched but not very interesting to you.

As always, it is good to start searching for a topic within your personal interests and previous writing. You might want to choose a research topic that you have pursued before and do additional research, or you might want to select a topic about which you would like to know more. More than anything, writers must remember that research will often carry them in different directions than they intend to go, and that they must be flexible enough to acknowledge that their research questions and topics must sometimes be adjusted or abandoned. To read more on narrowing and adjusting a research topic, see the section in this guide on Research Considerations.

Related Information: Flexibility in Research

As you conduct your research, it is important to keep in mind that the questions you are asking about your topic (and oftentimes, the topic itself) will probably change slightly. Sometimes you are forced to acknowledge that there is too much or too little information available on the topic you have chosen. Other times, you might decide that the approach you were originally taking is not as interesting to you as others you have found. For instance, you might start with a topic like "foreign language studies in grades K-12 in Oregon," and in the process of your reading you might find that you are really more interested in "bilingual education in rural Texas." Still other times, you might find that the claim you were attempting to make about your topic is not arguable, or is just wrong.

Our research can carry us in directions that we don't always foresee, and part of being a good researcher is maintaining the flexibility necessary to explore those directions when they present themselves.

Related Information: How Research Narrows Topics

By necessity, most topics narrow themselves as you read more and more about them. Oftentimes writers come up with topics that they think will be sufficiently narrow and engaging--a topic like "multiculturalism and education," for instance--and discover through their initial reading that there are many different avenues they could take in examining the various aspects of this broad issue. Although such discoveries are often humbling and sometimes intimidating, they are also a necessary part of any effective research process. You can take some comfort in knowing that you do not always need to have your topic narrowed to its final form before you begin researching. The sources you read will help you to do the necessary narrowing and definition of your focus.

Related Information: Research Topics and Writing Assignments

When you are choosing a research topic, it is important to be realistic about the time and space limitations that your assignment dictates. If you are writing a graduate thesis or dissertation, for instance, you might be able to research a topic as vast and as time-honored as "the portrayal of women in the poetry of William Blake." But if your assignment asks you to produce a five-page essay by next Tuesday, you might want to focus on something a bit more accessible, like "the portrayal of women in Blake's `The Visions of the Daughters of Albion.'"

Related Information: Testing Research Topics

Early in your research and writing process, after you have found a somewhat narrow avenue into your topic, put the topic to the test to see if you really want to pursue it further in research. Rise B. Axelrod and Charles R. Cooper, in The St. Martin's Guide to Writing , Third Edition, suggest some questions writers might ask themselves when deciding whether or not a research topic is workable:

• Does this topic really interest me?
• Do I know enough about it now to plan and write my essay, or can I learn what I need to know in the time I have remaining?
• Is the topic manageable within my time and space limits?
• Do I have a good sense of how others view this issue and what readers I might address in my essay?
• Have I begun to understand the issue and to formulate my own view?

Students are often asked to write essays in which they evaluate something: a product, a piece of writing, a restaurant, an advertising campaign, or some other entity related to their areas of study. Sometimes when you are given this type of writing assignment, you are also given a very specific topic on which to write. Other times, you are asked to find a topic for evaluation on your own.

Related Information: Comparing and Contrasting

After brainstorming a list of possible topics for evaluation, you may find it difficult to determine whether or not you will be able to effectively evaluate those topics. One way of stimulating your mind's evaluative tendencies is to try comparison and contrast. For example, if you are thinking about evaluating a local Thai restaurant, and you are having trouble coming up with points on which to evaluate it, try comparing and contrasting it with another local Thai restaurant. When we begin to compare two items, ideas, places, or people, we invariably wind up evaluating.

Related Information: Generating an Authority List

If the choice of topics to evaluate is open to you, try brainstorming a list of skills, activities, places, or subjects that you consider yourself to be an authority about. A list like this is a good starting point for just about any essay, but it is particularly useful in evaluation. If you are an avid rock climber, for instance, it makes perfect sense for you to evaluate climbing equipment, since your experience will provide you with a basis for evaluation. It may still be necessary to do research, but you will have a head start even before you begin researching.

Related Information: Questions to Ask Yourself as You Evaluate

In testing possible topics for evaluation, you might ask yourself some very general questions about your initial thoughts. Rise B. Axelrod and Charles R. Cooper, in their St. Martin's Guide to Writing , Third Edition, suggest a few such questions:

• How certain am I of my judgment? Do I have any doubts? Why do I feel the way I do?
• Do I like (or dislike) everything about my subject, or only certain parts?
• Are there any similar things I should consider (other products or movies, for example)?
• Is there anything I will need to do right away in order to research this subject authoritatively?
• If I need to do any research, can I get the information I need?

As a writer, you will sometimes be asked to speculate on possible solutions to known problems. Although the process of problem solving is itself quite difficult, one of the greatest challenges about that process is the matter of finding a topic that lends itself to your purpose.

Related Information: Evaluating and Problem Solving

Problem solving is an extension of the evaluating process. If in the past you have written evaluative essays which identify certain problems, these essays might offer you some topic ideas and starting points. You might also look to personal writing you have done (like journal entries) or recent conversations you have had as ways of recalling the types of problems that you have identified in your general environment.

Related Information: Focusing on Solvable Problems

Obviously, not all problems are appropriate topics for short problem solving essays. For example, if your instructor assigns a ten-page problem solving essay dealing with a current problem of your choice, you might want to avoid a topic as vast as "racism." However, if you were to focus on a more context-specific version of this hulking problem, you might find a workable topic (say, for instance, minority enrollment on your campus). For assignments like these, it is important to choose problems that appear solvable (or at least approachable) in the time and space you have available to you.

Related Information: Identifying Problems Within Communities

One excellent source of topics for problem solving essays is your immediate environment. Think about the groups or communities to which you belong: your neighborhood, college, family, ethnic and cultural groups, religious and political groups, workplace, and recreational groups. Try to brainstorm a list of problems that you can readily identify in any of these communities, then consider both how solvable these problems are and how appropriate they are to your writing assignment.

Generating More Than One Topic Idea

In order to choose a topic, you need to have several available to choose from. It is best to avoid being committed to one topic at this first stage of the writing process, since not every topic will pan out. Writers are usually more successful when they have a selection of topics which they can put to the test to determine whether or not they are workable (given the writing assignment).

Narrowing Topics

The scope of a topic depends on how much time and space you have to write and how much detail you are trying to use. For example, describing all the causes of World War II in three pages is impossible. You would have to either narrow your topic some more or write hundreds of pages to adequately discuss every cause. Defining your topic before you start writing will save you time and help you to research and/or to develop your thinking in a clear, methodical way. It is important to examine the topics we choose to determine whether they are too broad (or, in some instances, too narrow) for the writing assignments we are given. Once you have decided that a topic is too broad to be appropriate to your assignment (which is most often the case), you will need to have ways to narrow it. You will also want to consider, when writing essays that require research, how your research resources and limitations affect your choice of topics.

Deciding When a Topic is Too Broad

Kate Kiefer, English Professor If a writer doesn't present details quickly enough, then the topic is usually too broad. If the reader can expect the paper to go in one direction, but it goes in another, the topic is usually too broad or not stated precisely enough. If I can ask six million questions about whether the writer will include this or that point, the topic is too broad. If I do a library search and turn up 200 listings (or an Internet search and discover 1,000 hits), the topic is too broad.

A topic is too broad to be workable when you find that you have too many different (but oftentimes remotely related) ideas about that topic. While you want to start the writing process with as many ideas as possible, you will want to narrow your focus at some point so that you aren't attempting to do too much in one essay.

Where essays requiring research are concerned, your topic is too broad if you are able to find thousands of sources when conducting a simple library or Internet search. For example, conducting a search on "foreign languages in Oregon" will provide you with policies, foreign language departments, and cultural issues (just to name a few). When this happens, you can try various narrowing strategies to determine what most interests you about your topic area and what relates to your own life most readily. For instance, if you plan to study abroad, focusing on the language you'll be speaking might be a way to narrow the scope of your original topic, "foreign languages in Oregon."

Deciding When a Topic Is Too Narrow

Steve Reid, English Professor You have to be careful so your topic is not too narrow for your audience. You don't want readers to say, " Well, so what? I couldn't care less." One of the most important roles a topic plays is impacting an audience. If you get so narrowed and focused, a topic can become too academic or pedantic. For example, every year at graduation I watch people laugh when they hear the title of a thesis or dissertation. The students who wrote these documents were very narrowed and focused, but their audiences were very restricted.

Though student writers most often face the challenge of limiting a topic that is too broad, they occasionally have to recognize that they have chosen a topic that is too narrow or that they have narrowed a workable topic too much. A topic is too narrow if you can't find any information about it. For example, suppose your foreign language is subject to, "foreign language policy in South Dakota." Although you might have a strong interest in this topic, South Dakota may not have a specific policy about foreign languages. If you have chosen the topic, "teaching Chinese in elementary schools," and your research attempts have been fruitless, it may be that you are considering a topic that no one else has previously presented. In other words, no one has determined that Chinese should be a major language taught as commonly as Spanish or French. If this happens to be the case, keep your topic in mind, because it could very well be an excellent topic for a graduate thesis or dissertation. However, it is also likely to be a difficult topic to handle in a ten-page essay for an education class, due in two weeks.

If your topic is too narrow, try making it broader by asking yourself related questions.

• What foreign languages are taught in South Dakota schools?
• Or where is Chinese taught and why?

Once you've found a different direction in which to move with your topic, you can try narrowing it again.

General Strategies for Narrowing Topics

One of the first things writers do when they realize that they need to narrow the scope of their topic is to ask themselves the "w" questions so familiar to journalists: Who? What? Where? When? and Why? (and oftentimes, How?) These questions can help you locate your specific points of interest within your general topic area. For example, to narrow a topic like "foreign languages," you could begin with the "what" and "when" questions and decide you are interested in "foreign language studies in grades K-12." Asking the "where" question, you might arrive at "foreign language studies in grades K-12 in Oregon." And asking the "who" question might cause you to limit the topic again to "state policy regarding foreign language studies in grades K-12 in Oregon." Each time you add something specific to your topic, you place "restrictors" on it, thereby narrowing it. Then, when you conduct a library or Internet search, you can use these "restrictors" as key words.

Related Information: Looping

Looping is an extended version of freewriting in which you begin with an initial five-minute freewrite on a general topic, then select out of that bit of writing the sentence or idea that interests you the most. You then use that sentence or idea as the basis for your next five-minute round of freewriting. You continue this process of elaborating informally on specific ideas until you come to a point where your topic seems sufficiently narrow, researchable, and appropriate to your writing assignment.

Example of Looping If I am freewriting on the general (and overly broad) topic of "development of small towns in the Rocky Mountain region," I might start with the following initial ideas: Problem: Development of Small Towns in the Rocky Mountain Region When I grew up in Anyoldtown, New Mexico, it was a small town in the smallest sense: no movie theaters, no supermarkets, nothing. We had to go into town for the things we needed. Land sold for $2000 an acre. Now it sells for about $50,000 an acre. Anyoldtown was also primarily hispanic, and the families who lived there had very little. Now the people who live there are mostly white and almost exclusively professionals: doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and an endless number of people who have money that seems to have come from nowhere. There are good things to be had there now: good restaurants, good coffee, and all the other things that come along with Yuppie invasion. But those things were had at quite a cost. People who used to live in Anyoldtown when I was a kid can no longer afford to pay property taxes. I can't think of anything else to write now. Oh, yes...these people made a killing off the sale of their land and properties, but they had to give up the places they had lived all their lives. However, by the time they sold, Anyoldtown was no longer the place where they had lived all their lives anyway. Rereading what I have written, I might decide that what interests me the most and seems most appropriate to the writing assignment I have been given is my idea about the property tax dilemma. With this in mind, I would write a second "loop" on this area of my thinking, perhaps even starting my freewriting with the exact sentence I used in the first "loop:" People who used to live in Anyoldtown when I was a kid can no longer afford to pay property taxes. This is unfair, because these people spent their entire lives in this town, and land was all they had. Theoretically, the Yuppie Invasion doesn't drive out the "townies" or "natives" of a small town, but in actuality, land values and property taxes (as well as cultural influences, of course) make it impossible (and oftentimes undesirable) for people to hold onto their own land. People have to sell, because if they don't, they can no longer afford to maintain the standard of living that their town has taken on (in more ways than one). This issue obviously has class implications, but I'm sure it also relates to cultural (ethnic) issues as well. This is where I would need to begin researching, if I wanted to see who was most negatively affected by rising property taxes and land values. In rereading this second loop, I might decide that my ideas toward the end of the paragraph interest me the most. I could write another loop expanding these specific ideas on race, class, and property taxes, or I might decide that I have (as my freewrite suggests) arrived at the point where I need to begin researching.

Related Information: Questioning

Alongside the basic "5 W's" ("who," "what," "when," "where," and "why") can be used more formal, directed questions provided by the classical rhetorical "topics." These questions function in four different ways, and can be categorized as follows:

Example of Questioning If my general topic is "Development of Small Towns in the Rocky Mountain Region," I might try to narrow my focus by applying questions with specific functions to this topic area, thereby discovering which approach interests me most. Here are some of the questions I might ask:

After writing the questions, I would write my responses, deciding which particular questions and responses interest me the most. Perhaps, for instance, I would find myself most interested in the effects of development on the "natives" of small towns, particularly the inevitability of increased property taxes. This process of questioning thus provides me with a specific, narrow, well-defined focus within the vast issue of development of small towns in the Rocky Mountain region.

Related Information: Topic Cross

The topic cross helps you to narrow your topic by using a visual strategy. Just as you would focus a camera or a microscope, you arrange key words and phrases about your topic in such a way that they eventually point to your specific area of interest.

Example of a Topic Cross The first step in the process of using the topic cross is brainstorming. Spend a few minutes listing words and phrases that come to mind when you think about your topic. Then decide which words and phrases are most interesting and arrange them in a hierarchy, moving from general (at the top of the list) to specific (at the bottom of the list). This hierarchy will become the vertical axis of your cross. Demonstration: If my topic is "development of small towns in the Rocky Mountain region," I might generate the following useful ideas in brainstorming (arranged from general to specific).

• The appeal of small towns
• Yuppie invasion
• Overcrowding in cities
• Cost of land
• Effects on town "natives."
• Economic effects on impoverished landowners.
• How John Doe in my home town was affected.
• The new espresso bar in town

I would write this list in an imagined middle column of a piece of blank paper or a computer screen, leaving plenty of space between each item. Then I would scan the list to determine where my real interest lies. Which topics in this list will be too broad to write about, given my writing assignment? Which will be too narrow? In this case, I might choose "economic effects on impoverished landowners" as a workable topic area. Once I had thus identified my area of interest, I would begin listing words and phrases about or relevant to that item, placing them on the horizontal axis of my topic cross. The list I would generate about "economic effects on impoverished landowners" might look like this:

• Increased cost of land
• Temptation to sell
• Rising property taxes
• Higher cost of living
• Zoning issues
• Pressure to maintain property value

Examining this list, I might decide that "rising property taxes" is a sufficiently narrow topic that is not too narrow to develop with my own ideas and research I might do. By using this strategy, I have arrived at a narrow, workable topic.

Research Considerations

If your writing assignment requires research, you will probably find that the research process itself will dictate how broad or narrow your topic should be. We have all had the experience of doing a library search on a word like "environment" and coming up with thousands of sources. Almost as common is the experience of searching for a term like "cultural animation" and coming up with only one source that seems useful. The topics we choose are often directly related to our research processes and their results.

Moving from Topic to Thesis

It is important to remember that a narrow topic is not the same thing as a thesis statement. Unlike a topic, a thesis makes a claim of fact, provides a claim of value, or makes a recommendation about a topic under consideration. For example, your narrowed topic might be "the underemphasis on foreign language in U.S. secondary schools." A focused thesis statement making a claim about this topic might read, "U.S. secondary schools should require elementary students to take at least one course in a foreign language sometime during the 4th through 6th grades."

Transforming a workable topic into a possible thesis is really just a continuation of the narrowing process, with an emphasis on what you want to say about your topic. In this way, it is much like the "hypothesis" stage of the scientific method. You arrive at a thesis by attempting to make a statement about the topic you have chosen.

Developing a Working Thesis

A working thesis is a tentative statement that you make about your topic early in the writing process, for the purpose of directing your thinking early. This thesis is likely to change somewhat or to be abandoned altogether as you move through the writing process, so it is best not to become too enamored of it.

There are two components of a working thesis. The first is, quite simply, your topic; and the second is your tentative statement about your topic. For example, if my narrowed topic is

"Rising property taxes in small towns in the Rocky Mountain region..."

I might add the following statement about that topic:

"...cause longtime residents and landowners in those towns not to be able to keep their property."

As I begin whatever research is necessary to support this thesis, I might find that I can't make this much of a claim. Or I might find that there are complexities that I hadn't considered. As I uncover new information about my topic, I will want to alter my working thesis accordingly, until it is workable and supportable.

Arriving at a Possible Thesis for an Essay Requiring Research

A In The St. Martin's Handbook , Third Edition [italics], Andrea Lunsford and Robert Connors suggest a process for moving from a topic to a research "hypothesis," by way of examining the "issue" at hand and framing this issue as a "research question." The following is an example of how I might move from topic to hypothesis if my narrowed topic is "rising property taxes in small towns in the Rocky Mountain region."

• Topic: Rising property taxes in small towns in the Rocky Mountain region
• Issue: The effects of these rising taxes on long-time residents and landowners in the small towns
• Research Question: What are the effects of rising property taxes on long-time residents and landowners in small towns in the Rocky Mountain region?
• Hypothesis: Because these taxes are increasingly difficult to pay, small town "natives" find themselves unable to hold onto their property.

This hypothesis, like a working thesis, is simply an early speculation on what I might find when I begin to research. As I read more and more about my topic, I will probably find that I need to make changes to the hypothesis in order to make it a supportable thesis. As I uncover new information about my topic, I will want to alter my working thesis accordingly, until it is workable and supportable.

Arriving at a Possible Thesis for an Essay Requiring You to Take a Position

One of the greatest challenges in written argument is determining what it is that you would like to (and are able to) say about your topic.

Narrowing from Topic to Thesis in Argument

Before you begin drafting an argument paper, you need to decide (tentatively, at least) what it is that you will be arguing about the topic you have chosen. The following prompts should help you focus your argument from a topic to a position on that topic. What is your topic? (e.g.--Rising property taxes in small towns in the Rocky Mountain region) What are three controversies associated with this topic? (e.g.--Rising property taxes make the town affordable only to the wealthy. This changes the flavor of the town. It forces long-time land owners to sell their land.) What are three questions people might ask about these controversies? (e.g.--Are these rising property taxes, which are the results of development in small towns in the Rocky Mountain region, forcing long-time land owners out of their home towns? Are rising taxes and land values changing the whole cultural and economic foundation of the towns? Given the effects of rising property taxes on impoverished land owners in small towns, is development in this area a good idea?) Decide which of these questions you are most interested in exploring. (e.g.--Given the effects of rising property taxes on impoverished land owners in small towns, is development in this area a good idea?) Now list several ways people might respond if you asked them your question. (e.g.--No, because impoverished land owners are unable to maintain the new standard of living. Yes, because development is always a good idea. Yes, because development is inevitable, and we can do nothing about it. Perhaps, but city planners and local governments must find ways to protect the interests of impoverished land owners when they determine property taxes.) Finally, decide where you stand in this range of responses. Think of a thesis that expresses your view. Write out your thesis and revise it throughout your research process until it is specific and takes a single arguable position. (e.g.--Because impoverished land owners in small towns in the Rocky Mountain region are often badly hurt by the rising property taxes resulting from development, city planners and local governments must find ways to protect the interests of these land owners when they determine property taxes.)

Working With Topics in Different Disciplines

Don Zimmerman, Journalism and Technical Communication Professor Writers' understanding of topics and their fields of study allow them to focus on a specific topic. Following a good problem solving process or scientific method can help you select a topic. Whereas on the job, topics emerge from day to day activities. When working, you don't need to look for topics to write about. Your respective field/job responsibilities allow you to find the problems.

The ways that topics are approached and the types of topics that are discussed vary from discipline to discipline. It is important to investigate the types of topics that are discussed (and the ways that they are discussed) in your own discipline. As a writer, it is necessary to determine what topics are talked about and why in your own discipline (or in the discipline for which you are writing). This can be done by way of talking to professionals in the discipline, looking at relevant journals, and conducting Internet and database searches (to name a few possibilities).

Related Information: Browsing Journals Important to Your Discipline

Almost every discipline has journals that are associated with it, and scholars in the discipline depend on these journals in order to remain informed about what topics are being discussed. For example, scholars in the field of psychology rely on psychological journals; doctors rely on medical journals; and English professors rely on literary journals. Because journals are at the center of each discipline's current discussions, it is a good idea to browse them when looking for current topics. If you are unsure of how to go about doing this, talk to a professor in your discipline, a reference librarian in your library, or a librarian in your library's Current Periodicals room. These people can usually provide you with a few titles of important journals relevant to your field. Once you have these titles, you can locate a few issues of each journal in the Current Periodicals room, sit down for an hour or two, and look through the articles to see what is being talked about and what interests you.

Related Information: Online Searches and Databases

One way of getting to the sources which will discuss topics current to your discipline is by searching the various computer databases and search engines related to that discipline. A database is simply an arrangement of information by way of similar subject matter. Some multidisciplinary scholarly databases include ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and OpenAlex. There are more specialized databases as well for almost every discipline. For example, if you were researching a topic for a Sociology essay on group behavior of Deadheads, you might go to the Social Sciences Index to find sources related to your topic. For information on how to find relevant and useful databases, talk to the reference librarian in your library, or ask an expert in your field which databases they use regularly.

Related Information: Talking to Professionals in Your Discipline

One of the most efficient ways to learn what topics are currently being discussed in your discipline is to talk to the experts: instructors and other professionals working within that discipline. We often forget that these people can be valuable resources to us, and can point us toward books, journals, databases, and other sources of information that scholars in our various fields use often.

Additional Resources

Harvard Extension School - ' Choosing a Topic '

Purdue OWL - ' Choosing a Topic '

USU Libraries - ' Choosing a Research Topic '

York College - ' Choosing a Topic and Identifying Keywords '

Nesbitt, Laurel, Dawn Kowalski, & Andrea Bennett. (2022). Choosing and Refining Topics. Writing@CSU . Colorado State University.  https://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=20

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10.3: The Topic and Thesis

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• Page ID 147051

• Lisa Coleman, Thomas King, & William Turner
• Southwest Tennessee Community College

Learning Objectives

After completing this section, students should be able to:

• explain how creating a speech is a holistic process.
• develop a speech in the proper order.
• create a speech using the appropriate lengths for sections.
• apply topic selection criteria to the selection of a topic for an audience.
• develop a specific speech purpose.
• translate a specific speech purpose into a properly worded thesis statement.

A Holistic Approach to Speech Development

Although there are "steps" to preparing a speech, a more appropriate way of thinking of speech preparation is as a dynamic process. Instead of seeing speech development as a linear process, it is better to see it as a holistic process of creating all components of speech, so they fit together as an effective whole. A puzzle metaphor demonstrates this approach.

As the model illustrates, the core of this dynamic process is the audience analysis, and the speech is built around our understanding of our audience. We then develop the content (selecting the topic, finding the content, and organizing the speech), and prepare the content for presentation (practice the delivery).

Although there is a sense of a linear process, sticking to some sort of artificial step process is not as important as making sure that all the pieces fit together as an effective, unified whole. Although we may have developed one area, as we prepare the whole speech, we may need to revisit earlier parts of the process and alter those to achieve a unified whole.

Parts of the Speech

While there are a variety of ways to organize a speech, the most common structure breaks the speech into four parts:

• Introduction
• Thesis/preview
• Body of the speech

Portions of the Speech

The introduction , ending with the thesis/preview , comprises approximately 10% of the speech. The body of the speech is about 85% of the speech, and the remaining 5% is the conclusion . The percentages should be used as guidelines for the speaker, not as absolutes. Most of the speaker’s efforts should be focused on relating the core information or arguments the speaker needs to share and the audience is there to hear. Since the body of the speech contains this core information, most of the time should be spent in that area.

• Order of development

In developing the speech, novice speakers often make the mistake of starting with the introduction. Since the introduction comes first, it seems logical to start there; however, this is wrong. Creating the thesis is the first step in good speech development. Until we know what the speech is about, we cannot effectively determine an introduction. Just as we cannot introduce a person we do not know; we cannot introduce a topic not yet developed. The most effective order of preparation is:

• Thesis. Since the thesis defines what the speech is about and what it is not about, developing it first helps guide the speaker in developing the body, doing research, and staying properly focused.
• Body. The body of the speech is the key content the audience is there to hear, so the speaker should spend a substantive amount of time researching, organizing, and fine-tuning this core content.
• Introduction. A speech introduction is the most creative part of the process. Since it is intended to pull the audience into the thesis and prepare them for the body, by waiting until after developing the body, the speaker will have a clear sense of what the introduction should do. During research for the body, it is common to come across a quotation, example, or some other idea for the attention-getting device of the introduction.
• Conclusion. While it is the shortest part of a speech, it is especially important as it is the last thing the audience will hear, leaving the audience with their final impression of the speech. This is developed last as there are ways to conclude a speech that is built on how the speaker begins the speech.

While this order of development is important, always remember the “puzzle” metaphor: we must work to make all the parts fit together, so there can be a lot of revisiting parts to alter or fine-tune them. Speech development is a dynamic process in which changing one part of the speech may have a ripple effect, affecting other parts. In the end, a good speaker makes sure that the speech is consistent, coherent, organized, and flows well for the audience.

One of the most challenging steps classroom students face when given the classic speech assignment is to select and narrow a topic to fit the time limits of the assignment.

Topic Selection

Producing a topic “out of the blue” is quite difficult. Realistically, finding a topic for a classroom speech is far more difficult than finding one for a speech in a work or community setting.

Most presentations outside the classroom will be on topics in which the speaker is well versed and comfortable. If asked to speak, it will typically be to share knowledge within their field of expertise. If a business hires a Communication Studies instructor to present at a training session, they are clearly hiring them for expertise in communication. Even then, the speaker still has a responsibility to narrow it to a specific topic, to adapt it to their audience and the occasion, and to fit the time limits. So outside of the initial step, determining the overall subject, speakers still must go through the topic development process.

Topic Selection Criteria

In selecting a topic, one of the most common mistakes novice speakers make is to take a sender-based approach. This is assuming the audience has a strong interest in the same things the speaker feels passionate about. Just because a speaker may be deeply into video gaming does not inherently mean the audience shares that interest. To select a good topic, the speaker needs to be receiver-based and objectively consider what is most likely to be successful. While the speaker’s interest can certainly serve as a good starting point to identify a general topic, the specific topic and approach to the topic must be carefully considered.

There are four criteria to determine the appropriateness of a topic:

Time Limits - The speaker must fit the speech into the given time limits. The speech needs to fill the allotted time, and yet it cannot exceed that given time. It is a core speaker's responsibility to treat the audience with respect and to fill those time limits appropriately. Exceeding time limits is simply not an option. If a topic cannot be covered within a given time, the speaker has two options: limit the topic, or get a new topic. As we know from looking at culture, Americans are quite monochronic, events are scheduled one at a time, with one event following another. We see time as a resource, like money, to be budgeted and spent wisely. When speeches end on time, we have gotten what we have paid for. If they run a little short, we may feel we got a deal, but if they run quite short, we feel we got cheated. The audience is spending their time on the speaker; give them their money’s worth. On the other hand, if the speech runs too long, the speaker is "stealing" time from the audience, taking our time resources without our permission. Time limits are important in a monochronic culture.

• Audience Interest - We need to select a topic we think will appeal to a specific audience. This may be a topic we know the audience will have an immediate interest in or one in which the audience will have an interest once we develop the topic. Being receiver-based, the speaker must be honest in their assessment of the topic and the audience, careful not to project their own interests onto the audience.
• Speaker Interest - Although audience interest is certainly key, the speaker must also have an interest in the topic. A lack of speaker interest can be deadly. If the speaker is unmotivated to develop and present the speech, the speech usually sounds as if the speaker is bored and does not care. The speaker loses their own sense of desire to do an excellent job. A good topic is one that has a healthy balance of audience interest and speaker interest.
• Occasion Appropriateness - We need to consider why the audience is gathered and select a topic that fits the occasion. If the audience is gathered at a business conference, learning new ways of interacting with clients, an informative topic on some aspect of communication skills may be appropriate. For a commencement address, talking about the dire state of the economy may not fit the celebratory nature of the event; the topic should invoke growth, opportunity, and an optimistic future. We want our topic to complement the reason the audience is gathered.

Narrowing a Topic

Since the speaker needs to fit the speech into the allotted time, we need to move from a broader topic to a narrower, much more specific topic. Finding a specific topic is a process of analysis, selection, and narrowing. The goal of the process is to find a specific topic that fits the same criteria as discussed above: audience interest; speaker interest; occasion appropriateness; and time limits.

An effective way to narrow the topic is to start with a broader topic and brainstorm a large list of sub-topics. Using the previous four criteria, narrow the topic to the best fit. If the topic is still too large, repeat the process as often as needed to reach a manageable topic.

Specific Speech Purpose

After finding that specific topic, develop the specific speech purpose . The specific speech purpose is the narrow, focused direction the speech will be taking . The function of the specific speech purpose is twofold: to identify what goes in the speech, and to identify what does not go in the speech. The specific speech purpose establishes the parameters of the speech. We use the parameters as guidance as to what to include in the speech and what to keep out of the speech. This is an important consideration. Unless the speaker keeps a tight rein on the development of the speech, the speech can get out of control, suddenly diverting into a different area or expanding beyond the time limit.

For example, in an informative speech:

• To inform my audience on how to write an effective resume.
• To inform my audience of alternative forms of financial aid.
• To inform my audience of creative ways of using macaroni and cheese.

For persuasion, the specific speech purposes would be slightly different, reflecting the idea of changing an audience's belief, attitude, or action:

• To persuade my audience to donate blood.
• To persuade my audience to vote for the school referendum.
• To persuade my audience to use a designated driver.

Once the specific speech purpose has been developed, we can easily create the thesis . The thesis is the specific, concise statement of intent for the speech . It is the one, single sentence clearly stating exactly what the speech will address. Converting the specific speech purpose to the thesis is simple:

"To inform my audience on how to write an effective resume." becomes "Today I'll take you through the steps of writing an effective resume."

"To inform my audience of alternative forms of financial aid." becomes "There are several alternate forms of financial aid for you to consider."

"To inform my audience of creative ways of using macaroni and cheese." becomes "I'll show you several creative ways of using macaroni and cheese."

"To persuade my audience to donate blood." becomes "Today I'll show you why it is important that you donate blood."

"To persuade my audience to vote for the school referendum." becomes "Voting for the upcoming school referendum is important for the success of our schools."

"To persuade my audience to use a designated driver." becomes "When you go out partying, you should use a designated driver."

Good Thesis Traits

• Concise . The thesis is a simple, straightforward sentence clearly telling the audience what the speech is going to be about.
• Grammatically simple . There is one subject and one predicate; it is not a compound sentence, nor a compound-complex sentence. The thesis is not a question.
• Blatant . A speech thesis is blunter and more obvious than what we might use in writing.
• Identifies the parameters of the speech . It tells the audience what the speaker will be doing, which, by definition, also tells the audience what the speaker is not doing.
• Consistent with the speaker's overall speech purpose . The wording reflects the proper informative or persuasive tone.

Key Concepts

The terms and concepts students should be familiar with from this section include:

Speech Development

• Portions of the speech
• Audience interest
• Speaker interest
• Occasion appropriateness
• Time limits

Specific Speech Purpose The Thesis

• Grammatically simple
• Identifies parameters
• Consistent with purpose

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5 Chapter 5: Selecting a Topic and Adapting to the Audience

Lauren Rome, College of the Canyons

Adapted by Jamie C. Votraw, Professor of Communication Studies, Florida SouthWestern State College

Figure 5.1: Audience 1

Introduction

Think about the most exciting speech or presentation that you have ever heard. What made it so enjoyable? Was it the speaker’s charisma? Was the speaker funny? Were there excellent visual aids? Perhaps, a lively audience kept you engaged? Now, imagine that you did not care for the speech topic. Suppose you found the subject boring or confusing. Your experience would be markedly less enjoyable.

As you start thinking about your public speaking assignments, deciding what to speak about may not be your primary concern. In some speaking situations, the speech topic may be predetermined. For instance, if you are Captain of the Florida SouthWestern State College Women’s Volleyball team, and you are about to secure the Conference Championship again , the purpose and topic of your pre-game speech are likely pretty clear. In most cases, though, while the general purpose of your speech (e.g., to inform, to persuade, to inspire) may be predetermined, you will often be responsible for selecting the specific topic.

In this chapter, we will discuss how to select appropriate speech topics based on the speech goal and with consideration for the audience. Although novice speakers often express anxiety about speech delivery, the reality is that selecting the right topic largely impacts speech delivery and can significantly impact the success of a speech.

Selecting Your Topic

What makes a speech topic a good topic? Many people go to live concerts and love live music. Let’s consider what makes the show meaningful for the audience. Is it just musicians taking the stage and playing music, or is there more to it? The best concerts are the ones that consider what the audience really wants to hear. How would you feel if you went to a concert and the band didn’t play your favorite song? Most likely, the band crafted the environment with sets, sound, comfort, temperature, snacks, and drinks to make the concert worth the money. Just like a concert is nothing without the audience, a speech isn’t a speech without an audience.

Although we might think our speech would be easier without an audience, they are a crucial component and should be a primary focus as you plan and prepare each presentation. Effective public speakers consider the audience throughout the speech process from choosing a topic to identifying examples, and of course, during the speech delivery. Therefore, one characteristic of a good speech topic is that it meets the expectations of the audience and the speaking situation. What does the audience expect from the speech? What are their interests? What kind of response will the audience have to your topic?

In classroom speeches, the audience includes your classmates and your professor. But, before you go on assuming you know something about your audience, remember what we learned in chapter one: every person has their lens for viewing the world, which will be used when interpreting any messages you communicate. In that case, an important rule of thumb is to never assume . We must put aside assumptions or preconceptions to create the most effective and appropriate speech for a specific audience. Later in the chapter, we will discuss audience analysis and the methods you can use to gather accurate information about your audience.

Figure 5.2: John Legend 2

Another marker of a good speech topic is that you, the speaker, can identify with the subject matter. Your speech topic does not need to be wholly original or groundbreaking. Instead, it would be best to focus on a speech topic that is important to you. What interests you? What do you care about? What are your passions? Selecting a topic that matters to you will make the research and speech composition process more manageable and enhance your delivery. If you care about the topic, you will be more likely to speak passionately and with conviction. When speaking enthusiastically, speakers add dynamic to their vocal quality, engage the audience, and exude confidence.

A final consideration when selecting a topic is your pre-existing knowledge and ability to master the topic. When selecting a topic, you must consider the breadth and complexity of the topic, your background knowledge, and the speech assignment parameters. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I know my topic well, or will it require substantial learning?
• Is my topic too simple or too complex for the audience?
• Is the topic too broad or too narrow and trivial?
• Can I effectively accomplish my speech goal within the time limit?

A good topic is both important to you and exciting and appropriate for your audience. However, it also must be manageable for you. Consider the following example. A popular informative speech topic among public speaking students at FSW is climate change. Climate change is a fantastic issue to discuss in an informative speech. It’s a topic of significance. It is relevant, and it is interesting. It is also an appropriate topic for a college classroom setting. Yet, “climate change”, in general, is a complex, multifaceted topic. When a student proposes “To inform the class about climate change”, we wonder, will the speech focus on the causes of climate change? The consequences? Strategies for reducing climate change? Perhaps, the speech will focus on one specific issue related to climate change, such as increased wildfires or the impact of rising temperatures on food production and availability. A broad topic like climate change cannot be addressed adequately in a short 5-7 minute speech. Thus, a good topic is one that you can manage. As you brainstorm and research possible topics, give yourself time to explore your options. If you are interested in a complex issue like climate change, you should first investigate the broader subject matter and then refine your focus to a more narrow topic. Even if you know the general speech topic, exploring and refining your topic for your speech assignment can take time.

Refining Your Topic 

Once you have a good topic with a narrow focus, you should start thinking about how your chosen topic will help you accomplish your speech goal. To ensure your speech topic aligns with the expectations of the speaking event, consider the general purpose of the speech. A  general purpose  is the broad objective of the speech. Most speeches fall into one of the following categories: 1. to inform, 2. to persuade, or 3. to entertain. There are other general purposes, such as to introduce, to inspire, and to honor. We typically see these in special occasion speeches (discussed in Chapter 13).

To effectively craft your speech, you must determine the general purpose. In an informative speech, the general purpose is “to inform.” Note that a general purpose statement is a sentence fragment that indicates the broad speech objective. When the general purpose is to inform, the speaker acts as a teacher or educator. In an informative speech, the speaker’s goal is to share information with the audience objectively and unbiasedly. This means that the speaker should not be advocating or persuading. Instead, it is the speaker’s job to convey information accurately and clearly to help the audience understand and retain it. Although an informative speech may include competing perspectives, especially if the topic is controversial, an ethical informative speaker only teaches the audience about the varying viewpoints and refrains from taking a position or revealing personal opinions. Rather, an informative speaker shares information and lets the audience decide what to think or do.

To Persuade 

In a persuasive speech, the general purpose is “to persuade.” In this type of speech, the speaker acts as an advocate. The goal of a persuasive speech is to convince the audience to agree with the speaker’s point of view or take some action (e.g., sign a petition, stop smoking, etc.). Unlike informative speaking, a speaker is expected to take a position. Persuasive speaking is often more complex than informative speaking, as speakers must utilize persuasive speaking strategies to gain agreement from the audience. To win over an audience, persuasive speeches, in particular, demand credible evidence and sound logic that support the speaker’s claims. In Chapter 10, we will dive deeper into the various methods of persuasion a speaker can employ to persuade their audience.

To Entertain

When the general purpose is “to entertain,” the speaker is focused on amusing the audience. There is a variety of supporting materials that a speaker can incorporate to engage the audience. Entertaining speeches may consist of stories, anecdotes, quotes, and descriptions. To learn more about the types of supporting materials, turn to Chapter 7.

Determining the general purpose of your speech is a critical step in the speech composition process. A clearly defined speech goal helps the speaker understand their speaking role (i.e., a teacher, an advocate, an entertainer) and determines the information needed to craft and appropriately deliver the speech effectively.

Consider how changing the general purpose from “to inform” to “to persuade” could alter the focus of the speech in the example below.

Topic: Living in LightHouse Commons (FSW College Dorms)

In the examples above, the focus of each speech topic changes significantly when the general purpose of the speech shifts from informative to persuasive. Though there are certainly other potential topics that could be used for this example, you can see that informative speech topics focus on sharing information. In contrast, the persuasive speech topics seek to gain support for a particular point of view. Once you have determined your general purpose, you are ready to craft a specific purpose statement.

Crafting a Specific Purpose 

The specific purpose statement is a concise, declarative statement that identifies the general purpose of your speech, the audience, and the specific goal. Using the speech topic from the example above, “Living in Lighthouse Commons,” the respective specific purpose statements could be written as such:

• To inform incoming freshmen about the pros and cons of living on campus.
• To persuade incoming freshman students that they should live on campus for at least one year.
• To inform prospective FSW applicants of the cost-benefit analysis of on-campus vs. off-campus housing in the Ft. Myers area.
• To persuade the college administration to lower the price of on-campus housing.

In each specific purpose statement example, the speaker identifies the general purpose (e.g., to inform or to persuade), the audience (e.g., incoming freshman, prospective FSW applicants, college administration), and the specific goal of the speech. Notice that each specific purpose statement is crafted as a statement, not a question, and is written clearly and concisely.

Writing a Thesis Statement (central idea) 

Once you craft your specific purpose statement, you are ready to write a thesis statement . Building upon the general purpose and specific purpose statement, your thesis statement elaborates by adding the main points you plan to cover in your speech. Most speeches have 2-3 main points. In your thesis statement, you will clearly and concisely list your main points. Continuing with the examples above, a thesis statement might look like this:

• To inform incoming freshman students about the pros and cons of on-campus living, including social opportunities, access to academic resources, and the costs of living expenses.
• To persuade incoming freshman students that they should live on campus for at least one year for social, academic, and economic benefits.

In each thesis statement above, the general purpose, the audience, and the speech goal are identified, followed by the main points that the speaker will cover in their speech. Notice that the main points are listed precisely, but clearly indicate what topics will be addressed in the body of the speech.

Analyzing Your Audience

Since we cannot assume we know everything about our audience, we must analyze them. Audience Analysis is gathering information about your audience to help create and deliver your speech. Information collected can help you better understand your audience’s needs, values, beliefs, and demographics.

By engaging in audience analysis, you’re taking an audience-centered approach. To be audience-centered is to shift your focus from yourself (what do I want to say about this topic?) to your audience (what do they want or need to hear about this topic?). If you don’t consider your audience, you might deliver a speech that isn’t relevant, useful, or ethical. To make the shift to an audience-centered approach, here are some questions to consider:

• Why are they here? Are they here because they have to be (e.g., a mandatory meeting or a class session) or because they want to attend? Is your presentation the “main event,” or is something else bringing this audience together? Knowing the answer to this question can be extremely important in planning your speech to engage the audience directly.
• What do they know already? It would benefit you to understand what your audience knows or if they have any experience with your topic. Based on their knowledge, you can tailor the language and information of your speech to suit them. For example, giving a speech on global warming will sound very different if you are speaking to middle schoolers versus college-age students. A speech on the power of a dating app will be received differently by a room full of married people versus single people.
• Where are they coming from? Does every person in your audience share the same experiences? Absolutely not, because of their unique lenses to view the world. My siblings and I were raised by the same parents, under the same roof, but we are different (in age, gender, friends, hobbies, etc.) and had different experiences. So, although we have similarities, we all have different frames of reference (think back to chapter 1). Your goal is to write to a general audience so that you connect with all of the unique experiences.

Types of Audience Analysis

To answer the questions posed above, there are three different types of information you might want to collect. Depending on the speaking situation and the preparation time available, some of the following strategies will be better suited than others.

Demographic Analysis

You’ve probably heard the term “demographics” used before. A demographic analysis refers to the gathering of data from your audience relating to the population and groups within it. The U.S. Census Bureau is one of the best examples of a group known for collecting demographic data. Every ten years, census takers gather information about the population of the United States. They typically want to know the composition of each household – the number of dependents (children or adults), average annual income, ethnic backgrounds, the gender and ages of those in the household, and other similar information. This data is then compiled to provide the government and other agencies with an overall view of the individuals, families, and other collective groups that compose the population of the United States. This information might be used to determine whether to fund a community necessity or to project the country’s needs in future years. As you might imagine, gathering and compiling this tremendous amount of data is mind-boggling. Luckily, the data you’ll gather to prepare for a presentation is on a much smaller scale. Here are some examples of information you might collect about your audience:

• Gender identities
• Ethnic backgrounds
• Group memberships
• Educational levels
• Political affiliations
• Religious affiliations
• Socioeconomic statuses

How might information collected in these areas assist you in understanding your audience? After all, you won’t use this information to determine county funding or to analyze the needs of a city. You will, however, be able to use the information you collect to better understand your audience – who they are, and what they care about. For instance, your analysis might uncover a religious or political preference that might make it difficult for them to believe you or take your recommended course of action. Knowing these details about your audience will help you choose your language wisely and craft your speech.

Psychological Analysis

While demographic characteristics focus on the “facts” about the people in your audience, psychological analysis can help explain the inner qualities. Knowing their attitudes, beliefs, and values will help you better understand the psychology of the audience.

Being aware of your audience’s attitudes about certain topics can help you craft the best possible speech. An attitude embodies the likes and/or dislikes of an individual. We have attitudes about everything. For example, you might like Nike more than Adidas, or you think MAC has the best mascara. People have strong attitudes for or against one thing or another, which impacts their perceptions and interpretation of information.

Members of the audience may believe that certain things exist or certain ideas are true. Beliefs are convictions or ways of thinking about the world around us that are reflected in statements that we believe are true or false. Your conviction about something is typically based on your cultural upbringing. You believe what you believe because of what you learned and were taught. Beliefs evolve as your frame of reference develops through experience. Beliefs are another important consideration for audience analysis and speech development.

For example, most public speaking professors know that students are hesitant to take a speech class and often disagree that it should be a graduation requirement. Therefore, public speaking professors craft their messages for the first day of class in very particular ways to generate audience buy-in. In this example, public speaking professors have analyzed their audience to craft the message in a way that will be meaningful for them. How will you craft your speeches to align with your audience’s beliefs?

Values are the underlying principles or standards of ideal behavior that we use to justify our beliefs and attitudes. Values are the core principles driving our behavior and are the hardest to change. If you dig into someone’s attitudes and beliefs enough, you will find core values. We look at the world through our own lens of what we judge to be good or bad, right or wrong, moral or immoral, and ethical or unethical. Analyzing audience values will help you to connect your content to the audience.

All three of these psychological factors are important. Although they seem similar, they work in slightly different ways. Here is an example to showcase the nuance of attitudes, beliefs, and values. For example, consider these different notions:

• You like college (this is an attitude).
• You believe that college is a way out of poverty (there is a belief).
• You think everyone has the right to an education, regardless of attitude or cultural background (this is a value).

Situational Analysis

The final type of audience analysis is situational because it focuses on the specific speaking situation. Here are some basic questions you can answer to help you conduct situational analysis:

• How many people will be in the audience?
• What is my purpose for speaking to this audience?
• What will my audience get out of my presentation?
• What is their interest level in my subject?
• What else might this audience have on their mind?
• What is the configuration of the room we are in?
• Is your audience comfortable?
• Is there anything that can interfere with how my audience hears me?

Figure 5.3: Justin Trudeau s peaks at the University of Waterloo 3

Conducting Audience Analyses

We’ve just examined several variables of audience analysis, but how do you find the information you need? You conduct an audience analysis. Here are three options: data collection, inference, and direct observation.

Data Collection

You can collect data about your audience’s demographic, psychological, or situational makeup through quantifiable and deductive means. Surveys, questionnaires, and interviews would give you abundant qualitative and quantitative information you can use to develop your presentation. While data collection isn’t always required before a presentation, some situations would benefit from having specific information. Will your speech benefit from having specific data on the audience? If so, which method will you use?

This is a trickier method of collecting information about your audience. Inference means making tentative, reasoned conclusions about your audience. It requires that you use your critical thinking skills to make an educated guess about the audience. Beware that making educated guesses could backfire, if not grounded in evidence. For example, if we know that 46% of the U.S. population owns an iPhone, we can confidently infer that some students in our class own an iPhone. The only way to make a conclusive statement about how many students own an iPhone in our class, however, would be to comprehensively collect the data through a survey, questionnaire, or interview of every single audience member.

Direct Observation

One way to learn about people is to observe them. As we mentioned earlier, if you are speaking to a room full of classmates, you likely have already observed some demographic information about your audience ahead of time. The same can be true for other settings or environments where you find yourself.

What methods can you use to analyze your audience, especially in a classroom? Observation is as it sounds – you watch and listen to the individuals in your audience over the course of several days or weeks. If you think about it, you already do this without being completely conscious of it. As you chat during a break, you may find out that many of the students in your class are closely following an upcoming election. They have already formed opinions about the candidates and have their reasons for choosing one over the other. Or, perhaps several students in your small group share that they are single parents struggling to balance school, work, and children. While these tidbits of information are normally acknowledged and stored away in the recesses of your brain, you are, in fact, finding information that could help you prepare for an upcoming speech to these students. This is direct observation; all you had to do was actively listen to the chit-chat and conversations going on around you.

Audience Agreement

Whether you are doing an informative or persuasive speech, you can be sure that audience members may agree, disagree, be neutral, or be apathetic. Here is what these situations might look like:

Audiences that Agree

Students often pick topics based on their notion of a friendly audience. If I knew that 95% of my audience believed that we should only drive hybrid cars, it would be much easier to construct a speech knowing there wouldn’t be much opposition. So why even do a speech when you have an audience that already favors your position? Let’s look at a couple of examples. Some people in our society go to a place of religious worship, whether a church, temple, or mosque. If you already have a belief system, why do you need to go? Similarly, recovered alcoholics go to Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA, meetings. If you haven’t had a drink in ten years, why go to meetings? Maybe it is for personal growth, gaining knowledge, or attitude reinforcement. In each case, when you know that an audience already agrees with you, you can use the opportunity to reinforce their views.

Audiences that Disagree

When you know that an audience does not agree with your point of view, it is essential to capture their interest early. Disagreement doesn’t mean that you should not present your speech, or that you picked a bad topic. It just means that you need credible research, sound reasoning, and consideration for the type of language the audience will be receptive to hearing. It might be helpful to put your strongest argument first when you know your audience disagrees with you. It is also important that you don’t avoid topics that might be controversial because your audience disagrees. Controversial topics may prove to be the most interesting speaking opportunities and give you the chance to make a greater impact. In fact, the audience may be more receptive to a speaker who is open to acknowledging when there is validity in an opposing position while still arguing for a different point of view.

Audiences that are Neutral

Having a neutral audience is ideal. Suppose an audience has not yet made up their mind or taken a position on the topic. In that case, you can give the audience a balanced view of the topic in an informative speech, while in a persuasive speech, it is your chance to convince them. Whether you are doing an informative speech on TikTok, or a persuasive speech on the harmful effects of social media, a neutral audience most likely has not spent time critically thinking about their position. Your speech may be so compelling that some members of the audience may upload a video, or others may be motivated to delete the app.

Audiences that are Apathetic

The most difficult, or frustrating audience to speak to is the audience that doesn’t care; this is an apathetic audience. Your task is to make them care! For example, why would any group of 18 to 22-year-olds want to listen to a speech on the Social Security system? In most cases, they wouldn’t until you convince them that without reform, the Social Security program will run out of money before they are of age to collect. All of the money that you contribute from your paychecks goes to fund this system. Do you care yet? Maybe not, because you aren’t retiring for another 50 years! However, your parents or family members will retire earlier. If the system runs out of money, is it possible that you would find yourself in a position to care for your family members? You can make them care about your topic by showing them how important it is and how it can impact them. It is important to connect your topic to the audience explicitly. Sometimes public speakers ask personal questions to help show the connection between the topic and the audience. This is a useful attention-grabbing strategy and can be very effective. With apathetic audiences, however, you should also explicitly explain how the topic relates to them.

Presenting in an online environment

Chapter 11 discusses ways to deliver to a virtual environment. Like a physical speech knowing how to present information online is a necessary skill for the modern world. There are nine guidelines for a successful presentation suggested by Mary Abbajay in Forbes (2020), they are: get the lighting right, choose the right background, know the technology, play to the camera, get close (but not too close), stand up, do a sound check, plug into your modem, be yourself and have fun!

This chapter discussed how to effectively select a speech topic, identify speech purposes, craft specific purpose and thesis statements, as well as the importance of conducting an audience analysis when preparing and presenting your speech. Like a pop star crafting their live show at the Hollywood Bowl , you must keep your audience at the forefront of your mind during each step. Although you might not sing a solo during your speech or play the guitar, you can use demographic, psychological, and situational analyses to make adjustments where needed. The more you think about the audience throughout the entire process, the more likely they will listen, learn, and linger backstage for your autograph.

Reflection Questions

• Have you ever engaged in audience analysis in your personal life without realizing it? For example, in a conversation with a friend or parent or on social media? What strategies did you use to make sure you were understood?
• How have your attitudes, beliefs, and values informed some of your thoughts about people you meet?
• Which methods of audience analysis will you use in this class? How will you know which one works best?
• In what ways do the different types of audiences impact how you approach your entire presentation?

Audience Analysis

Audience-Centered

General Purpose

Specific Purpose

Thesis Statement

Introduction to Public Speaking Copyright © by Jamie C. Votraw, M.A.; Katharine O'Connor, Ph.D.; and William F. Kelvin, Ph.D.. All Rights Reserved.

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