Chapter 1

Chapter 1 of the Curious Researcher discussed methods for finding a topic and beginning your research. There were many different methods for choosing topic including lists of interests, random Google searches, and personal experiences. I believe I have found my topic already, so I focused more on the beginning research of this section. The author suggested that you make a giant list of all of the questions you can think of regarding this topic, and then pick the ones that are the most interesting to you to write about, because keeping interest in your topic is one of the keys to writing a good research paper. I also was interested in how narrowly he got his topic, focusing sometimes on a single question. He explains that when you focus down on a smaller topic, you can learn and notice a lot more things about the whole that you never thought of before. I plan to make a list of questions, do beginning research on theses questions, and then see which ones link together and which ones I could do a little more research on to make an interesting, informative research paper.