15b Formulate a research question and hypothesis.

Once you have analyzed your task, chosen your topic, and narrowed the topic to make it manageable (see 7a), formulate a research question that you can tentatively answer with a hypothesis. The hypothesis, a statement of what you anticipate your research will show, needs to be manageable, interesting, and specific (see 7b). In addition, it must be a debatable proposition that you can prove or disprove with a reasonable amount of research evidence.

David Craig, the student whose research paper appears in Chapter 52, made the following move from general topic to a narrowed topic and then to a research question and hypothesis:

TOPIC Electronic messaging
NARROWED TOPIC The language of messaging
ISSUE The effect of messaging on youth literacy
RESEARCH QUESTION How has the popularity of messaging affected literacy among today’s youth?
HYPOTHESIS Messaging seems to have a negative influence on the writing skills of young people.