Refining Your Topic

Now that you have chosen your topic you can work on modifying it. Sometimes subjects can be too broad or too narrow, making researching difficult.

Examples:

Terrorism - is a broad subject you may want to narrow down by looking at different aspects of it.

• Cyber Terrorism
• Terrorism in the Middle Eastern
• Financing Terrorism

Emigration and Immigration - is another broad subject. There are many different sub-topics that you can use to narrow this subject.

• Illegal Immigration to the United States
• The Border Fence
• Illegal Immigration and Crime
• Emigration into the European Union

Gangs in Brownsville Texas - is an example of a very narrow subject. There may be limited materials on this topic but not enough to write a 10 to 20 page paper. In this case you would want to broaden your subject.

• Gang Violence in the United States
• Texas Gangs
• European Youth Gangs
• Skinhead Gangs

A great resource to use to refine your topic is the subject search feature of the UTPA Library Catalog. It will give you alternative subject terms to help you modify your topic.

After you have your topic set the next step is to create a thesis statement using your subject.