Choosing an Essay Topic without Mistakes
1. Leaning towards bad judgment
No matter how you think you are “creative and controversial,” you need to understand that we have some areas you need to keep off. For example, if you are writing about a topic touching on something that is morally or legally unacceptable, you cannot approach it positively. For instance, you cannot choose a topic that glorifies drugs or prostitution and expects it to go down well with your instructors unless they are sex pests or drug barons/addicts!
2. Sharing your dirty past
If you are writing a personal narrative or an application essay that requires you to give your life’s experiences, including failures, this point is worth noting. No matter how “open” you want to be in your writings, avoid sensitive areas such as your past criminal records and behavior because you will end up writing bad college essays. You can only include them if you are sure that the information is in public knowledge and you are approaching it in a manner that shows how you overcame and learned from them.
3. Failing to ask the right questions
Among different mistakes students make when choosing their research paper or essay topics, the most popular one is failing to ask relevant questions. It is not strange to get a prompt that may require you to get further clarification from your instructors before coming up with an appropriate topic. If you approach your paper without clarification, you could have gotten by asking the rights questions, and you will end up with the wrong or weak topic. If you fail to ask questions, you will miss a lot of relevant information that could have helped you brainstorm.
4. Getting too personal
Another blunder you need to avoid while selecting your paper’s title is getting too personal. Do not choose topics that can reveal your sensitive and personal information to the outside world. For example, it will be unwise to choose a topic that touches upon sensitive information regarding your sexuality. Failing to draw this boundary will portray you as a moral pervert or a careless individual who has no respect for personal privacy. Besides, such a reckless blunder will make your essay border obscenity.
5. Failing to read the prompt carefully
Another serious mistake that will cripple your essay topic selection process is failing to read your prompt well. If you do not take your time and read your essay question properly, you will most likely select the wrong topic. Even if you select the right one, you can end up with a topic you may not discuss fully. Failing to analyze your essay prompt will deny you the necessary information to help in the selection process because you won’t see the big picture.
6. Taking an offensive and controversial angle
Another blunder to avoid is selecting an essay topic that will lead you to a lengthy discussion touching a controversial area. Good examples of such topics are those related to religious debates, politics, and abortion. If you delve into such an area, you will portray yourself as a “closed-minded zealot” trying to force other people into accepting their ideologies. If you want to discuss politics, an essay is a wrong platform because you can exercise your constitutional rights and discuss it in a political gathering.
7. Getting too broad
The last goof to avoid when choosing an essay topic is choosing a too wide topic to exhaust within your stipulated word count. If you choose an essay topic that requires more wordings to defend its thesis statement and help your reader understand it, you can confuse the reader. The reason is that in the absence of sufficient evidence, you will present your readers with half-baked information that may not convince them of the merit of your thesis statement.
Summing up
When choosing an essay topic for your essay, approach it with care and discretion. The reason is that once you fail to get it right here, your whole essay will take the shape of your erroneous topic. If you want to make your essays compelling, avoid all the blunders we discussed in this post.
