English 102 Composition II / Research: Refining Your Ideas

Doing great research and writing a paper is a winding, circular path, not a linear one!

Your research and your writing will often happen at the same time.

You may find that as you progress you will need to circle back, do more research, or refine your ideas as you go.

The links below might provide some additional help:

• Building a Library Research Strategy Guide 
  An SVC guide to help you with your research papers, start to finish.
• Citing Sources 
  An SVC guide to help you with citations in many forms.

SVC Tutoring Center

SVC Writing Center 

LINK

1 minute tutorials from Credo database

Login with your MySVC/Canvas username and password

• Paraphrasing Tutorial 

• Synthesizing Research

Try the "Five W's" to help refine your topic:  

The questions below will help you to investigate and narrow down some ideas about your topic. Circle or highlight names, terms, and ideas that interest you the most. You might turn this into a list of search terms or "keywords."  

• WHO - Who is affected by your topic?  Don't just think of the focus of your topic but who are the other stakeholders that might be impacted?
• WHAT - What are the causes and effects of your topic?  What impacts might there be?
• WHEN - Is there a specific time-period that you might focus on? 
• WHERE - Is there a certain geographic location to focus on?  
• WHY - Why is this topic important?  Why should your audience care?

(image from the Noun Project "five" by Adam Zubin, MV)