RHETOR 1A: Rhetoric

• Academic Search Complete
  articles in more than 10,900 journals - scholarly and general articles
  
• Project MUSE
  articles from 250 scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences.
  
• ArticleFirst
  articles from 11,000 popular magazines and scholarly journals
  
• JSTOR
  Includes over 1000 scholarly journals - scholarly -- not current
  

"I'm writing a paper on World War II." 

Often students start their research with a very general topic, even though they may realize the topic is too large to deal with in a 10-15 page paper.  Faculty and librarians tell them, "You have to narrow this down."  But how do you narrow a topic?

Ask yourself--

• What discipline am I working in?  If you are in a sociology class, ask a sociological question about World War II, like "How did WWII affect women?"  If it's a political science class, your question might be something like "How did WWII affect presidential elections in the US?"

• What are some subsets or aspects of your topic.  Some good aspects are:
  • by place, such as a country or region
  • by time period, such as a century, decade or year 
  • by population, such as men, women, ethnic group, youth, children or elderly

You can combine these ideas, "What were the major impacts of WWII on women in France, in the decade after the war?"

More ideas in our brief tutorial on topic selection and narrowing.