Narrowing Your Topic
Narrowing Your Topic
Page 244
Now that you have searched for potential topics, it’s time to make a choice. Your goal is to select the topic that best meets the following three criteria:
- Is it a topic you are interested in and know something about?
- Does the topic meet the criteria specified in the assignment?
- Is it a topic that your audience will find worthwhile?
Once you are satisfied that your topic meets these criteria, you can begin to consider how to break down your topic further so that it is more specific and manageable. This will aid you a great deal in your research (which we discuss later in this chapter) since it is considerably easier to find information on a specific topic (such as traditional Jewish foods served for Passover) than on an extremely general one (such as the Jewish faith). One way to narrow down your topic is to break it up into categories. Write your general topic at the top of a list, with each succeeding word a more specific or concrete topic. As illustrated in Figure 11.2, you might begin with the very general topic of cars and trucks and then narrow it down a step at a time until you focus on one particular model (the Chevy Tahoe hybrid) and decide to persuade your listeners about the advantages of owning a hybrid vehicle with all the SUV amenities.
