3. Narrow Your Focus

Once you've done some initial background reading, it's time to narrow down your focus to what you really want to write about. Remember your assignment requirements and consider what you've read thus far.

For this assignment you will need to focus on a few things:

Reading different points of view on your topic

Identifying Bible passages that are relevant to your topic

Reading interpretations of those passages

Creating your own interpretation

Researching the historical background of those passages

As you start to focus on some passages, you'll want to continue to look for sources for interpretation and historical context of those passages. As you read, you might tweak or adjust your interpretation. In order to help you find more related sources about your topic, you'll want to identify keywords to help you search.

Keywords

As you think about what concepts you want to write about, think about what particular words might be found in a good source about that topic.

Once you have selected a passage, you can try searching for the author of that passage along with terms from your topic.

Tip: When researching topics, remember that different sources may use different terms, so you may need to try multiple variations of words that describe subject or topic

Keywords work best by trial-and-error. Never do only one search. Some keywords will work better than others, and some keywords may lead you to different articles than you found in your first search. Search the databases with the keywords you selected to find relevant articles. And remember to ask a librarian if you need assistance coming up with keywords or looking for sources.

To search multiple keywords at once, you need to use connector terms, also called Boolean Operators. Using a Boolean Operator will tell the database to connect the terms together in your search.

There are three Boolean Operators:

AND: All keywords must appear in your results. AND will narrow down a search.
OR: Either of the keywords must appear in the results. OR will give you more results.
NOT: Excludes certain keywords from your results. NOT will narrow down a search.

Depending on the database you are using, there may be a place to choose which Boolean Operator you want to use, or you may have to type them in with your keywords.