2 Step 2 | Brainstorming

You may ask why it is important to brainstorm but it is crucial to the process of developing a research topic. It gives you the opportunity to focus on your interest beyond what is generally discussed online and in the classroom. Below you will find some brainstorming activities to try, along with video explanations. Once you have explored these options, try them out for your own research paper. You may find, using them together will enhance your brainstorming process leading to an effective source gathering process that you will encounter in step three.  

Free Writing: Is easy to master and is one of the most common and effective brainstorming techniques for writing classes.  All you do is write about anything that comes into your head without stopping for a short time—five minutes or so.  The key part of this activity though is that you cannot stop writing for any reason!  Even if you don’t know what to write about, write “I don’t know what to write about” until something else comes to mind.  And don’t worry—something usually comes to mind.

Mind Mapping: A learning tool that can be used to flush out your ideas and organize your thoughts using a diagram. You take your central idea and write out what you know about that particular area. Ask the who, what, where, and why questions surrounding your topic area. List key people, date ranges, policies, and even geographical areas that influenced the development of your topic area. Creating a mind map gives you the space to remember what you know and find gaps for what you would like to learn. It is a process that builds confidence in the research process and provides a guide for you to use while searching online and within databases. It is a great addition to your search strategy rule book.

Generally, after brainstorming you will have a series of interconnected ideas in which a topic will emerge. To turn back to the example of generative AI, if you are curious about ethics, then you must determine in what way? Environmental? Social? Educationally? If you are concerned about its ethics in education, then you must determine the demographics. College? High School? Perhaps the subject? In English classrooms? Math? Science? What kind of generative AI? ChatGPT?  Google Gemini? These are all ideas that come together to make a topic. These are the same type of questions we discussed when developing the example paper for this tool. By asking these questions, we were able to search for resources that discussed the ways AI is used in higher education, specifically in classrooms.

Developing a Thesis

During the brainstorming process your ideas will start to take shape, however they may change as you do background and academic research. The more you know, the more your thesis will evolve throughout the entire research process.

For our purposes, a thesis advocates a specific and debatable issue.  In academic writing, the thesis is often stated fairly directly in the first third or so of the writing, though not usually at the end of the first paragraph where students are often told to place it.  The sentence or two that seems to encapsulate the issue of the essay is called a “thesis statement.”

A working thesis is more or less a temporary thesis you devise at the beginning of the research process in order to set some direction in your research. You will have a “working thesis” for a good portion of the research process. By the time you have found your sources and begin constructing an annotated bibliography, your thesis should be definitive. The issue you plan to address should be identified.

Information Adapted from:

Library 1600: Introduction to College-Level Research | Current contributors include: Abbey K. Elder, Rano Marupova, Kris Stacy-Bates, Cara B. Stone, and Erin Thomas CC BY-SA 4.0

The Process of Research Writing | Steven D. Krause | Spring 2007 | CC BY-NC-SA