Chat with a Librarian
Skip to Main Content
ask a librarian email questions

ENG 201 America's Uniqueness Research Assignment

3. Narrow Your Topic

Once you've done some initial exploration of the era and the literature, it's time to narrow your focus to some concrete aspects you want to focus in on.  Choose the aspects of the history and literature that you think will be most helpful to support your ideas. Begin to brainstorm a working thesis that states the viewpoint you are going to argue/support in your paper. 

As you start to work on your thesis and supporting examples, you'll want to brainstorm keywords that might help you find secondary sources. You may decide to adjust your topic or thesis as you search for sources. This is a natural part of the research process.  See below for some help on brainstorming keywords

Search Tips

As you think about what concepts you want to write about, think about what particular words might be found in a good article about that topic. Consider the following when searching databases and e-books:

  • Enter the author or the name of the work with the word "and" and the concept you are looking for. Example: "Young Goodman Brown" AND superstition
  • Keywords work best by trial-and-error
  • Never do only one search
  • Some keywords will work better than others.​ Consider synonyms or words that may bring up articles that include your topic. If you use the word "OR" between your search terms, it will include results with any of those terms in them:

    Prosperous OR Successful OR Thriving

  • You can use truncation to search for all variations of a word. Use an asterisk (*) after the beginning of a word to get results that include all variations of that word:

    • Prosper* will return results with the words prosperous, prosperity, etc.

    • Individuali* will return results with the words individualism, individualistic, individuality, etc.

  • Remember to also use "Search Within Results" option to search further into your results.

  • To find a specific word in an article, hold down the "Ctrl" key (or "Command" key if you are on a Mac) and then hit the letter "F" and then enter the word you are looking for in the box that appears.
  • And remember to ask a librarian if you need assistance coming up with keywords or looking for sources.
Subjects: English