Lesson 18: Coming up with a Topic

Okay class, here we go. How does one figure out what to write about? It can be hard sometimes when teachers don't give you a topic to write on; one would think that being able to write about anything would make life easier, but that is not always the case. For example, just a few minutes ago, I logged onto blogger.com to write a blog post, but could not figure out what to write about. So I decided to write about how to come up with topics when writing papers.

Of course, this depends greatly on what class you are writing for, whether it's an English class, a business class, or a science class. This goes back to audience awareness. Not only your topic, but also your writing style, will be greatly affected by who you are writing for. You will want to make sure that what you write will benefit your reader, and hopefully be interesting, too.

But I think that the most important thing to keep in mind when trying to come up with a topic is to make sure that you have plenty of things to say on that topic. You wouldn't want to start writing your essay or report, only to find out that you have nothing else to say on the topic half way through. That would be really sad, because you would then have to think of a new topic and start all over, or rack or brain to find more stuff to say. So it is always a good idea when beginning a paper to brainstorm to see what you know about the topic and how much more you could find out about it.

Well class, this will be all for today. Good luck with coming up with a topic for your next paper!