Developing Research Questions

As you begin to think about potential paper topics, you may find it helpful to brainstorm a list of possible questions to drive your writing.  Even though it may not alwasy be apparent, most argumentative writing sets out to answer a question.  The more you think about the question(s) you want to answer, the easier it is to select a narrow, specific, relevant focus for your paper.  For example, the question "Is the president performing his role adequately?" is far too broad a question for any of the papers you'll write in 1010.  But with a bit of thinking, you can potentially break this question into a series of much more managaeble topics.