Choosing the Right Essay Topic: Unleashing Your Creativity
Choosing an essay topic is the most crucial step of writing an essay. There are many instances you be required to write an essay for university work, college and high school scholarships, and college and middle school research papers.
There are several tips that you should apply when choosing a topic that will make it easy for you to write this essay. Let’s discuss these tricks that you should apply to unleash your creativity.
1. Select a Topic that You Like
List the topics you are interested in and choose the best. Writing about something you like is effortless and even your readers can tell you have a passion for the subject. Your creativity becomes high because you can easily convince or inform your readers.
An interesting topic will also earn you more marks if it’s an assignment than something that you don’t like. Therefore, your interest in a topic will boost creativity and enthusiasm in writing.
2. Choose Something That You Know
Select something you know about for easy processing and writing of the content. Also, writing something you know saves you time because you write fast; you only require less research and less time to digest the facts.
For educative topics, you need a subject that you are well informed. However, if you want to persuade your audience, it should be a topic that you’re passionate about. Note that you should always have enough ideas for whatever subject you choose.
3. Brainstorm
When you can't decide on a topic, it's best to think of preferences in your mind. You may be required to write a scholarship, and you aren't sure what to focus on; write down all the ideas in your mind. If it’s a speech that you should give for an occasion or write as a class assignment, make a list of all the thoughts you have.
Go through the list, think about your life, and get something that aligns with your preferences. Sometimes you can even look around you, outside the window, in the room, or gaze in the air and get ideas. You may think of a game, hobby, goal, or find inspiration in certain aspects of your life or another person, like your mentor. Use those inspirations to develop a topic and later write an essay.
If all these tips can’t help you, don’t give up. Here is a list of special occasion speech topics that can help you.
4. Researching
If you aren’t sure of what to write about, get some books, online articles and read through the ideas. Search for the topic in news articles, research journals, news, and other resourceful materials. You will find an angle on how you can approach a topic that’s vague to you.
5. Break Your Topic into a Specific Idea
If you have an idea you need clarification on, ask yourself if you can explore it and prove a point easily. If the subject will take 5, 20, or 30 pages to pass your main message, it's a broad topic, and you need to dissect it.
Refine the topic until it’s manageable. Write down the main ideas you will expound in the essay to confirm if you can handle them in one article or if you need to slice it further.
6. Seek Help
You can always seek help from your teachers or peers on which idea is more prudent to handle. Someone may have an opinion that will help you see things differently and make you think more creatively. There is no harm in seeking assistance; it’s more helpful than research because you can exchange ideas, eliminate others, and build on one.
Common Mistakes that You Should Avoid When Choosing an Essay Topic
- Reusing a topic – you may end up stealing all the ideas in the essay, which is unprofessional.
- Choosing a boring topic – it’s waste of time researching and you won’t achieve the topic’s purpose
- Failure to narrow a topic – it becomes hectic while explaining your points
Parting Shot
While choosing the best essay topic can feel like a daunting task, especially for the first time. We have made this task easy by providing the best tips for choosing a topic. You can research, brainstorm, and choose a subject you like or know about. Alternatively, you can always seek help from your instructors or even peers.