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.

Ask yourself:

What aspect of the topic do I want to focus on?

What interests me about the topic?

What do I want to write about?

As you start to narrow this down into a thesis, you'll want to continue to look for more sources. As you read, you might tweak or adjust your topic/thesis. 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. For instance, if you are writing about the theological difficultly of Hosea's context (marrying a prostitute and call him to suffering).

Keyword search: Hosea and theological difficulty and prostitute and suffering

Keyword search: Hosea and wife

Keyword search: Hosea (sometimes less is better when the terms are unique)

Think of related keywords that you might want to try:

Theological -religious, moral, spriritual, divine, ecclesiastical

Difficulty-conflix, dilemma, struggle, trial

Prostitute/Wife- harlot, whore, fallen woman, adulterous wife, unfaithful wife

Suffering-hardship. torment, torture, misery, adversity, distress

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.