Your paper topic may come from one of the texts that you will read in this course. Once you know what book you may want to research, you will want to concept map the book with themes in the book you may want to research.
Concept mapping is an easy exercise to put on paper your ideas and directions you want to go. Below, I concept map James Joyce's novel with some of the themes.
Now that you have created your concept map, there should be one or two aspects of your topic that seem both interesting and able to be turned into a workable question. Narrow your focus: you know what you're going for; now put it in the form of a question. Below I'm starting with a book you're not covering, Native Son by Richard Wright.
In the example to the left, I have added three limiters to my topic of Native Son.
Character: Bigger Thomas
Theme: Racism
Transformation: Behavior
These limiters help me narrow down my topic and gets me closer to a research question:
Native Son's Bigger Thomas Racism Behavior
Research Questions can be a:
or
or
Your research question MUST: