Analyze the Writing Task
Much of your college writing will be in response to very specific assignments: your physical science professor may ask you to write a paper presenting pro and can evidence of the greenhouse effect. With such a narrowed topic, you can move ahead to collecting information and formulating a thesis, a one- or two-sentence statement of your main idea. At other times your instructor may assign only a general subject and ask you to choose a particular aspect of it to write on. For example, your business teacher may assign a paper on retail merchandising, giving you the opportunity to choose a specific topic (say, the popularity of recreational vehicles), and develop your own thesis (to explain how the sale of recreational vehicles is affected by the economy).
Sometimes your instructor will allow you to write on any subject that interests you. In such a case, you may already have an idea for a paper in mind (why you feel that federal funding for post-secondary education should be increased, for instance). What happens, however, when you are free to choose your own subject and you cannot think of anything to write about? If you find yourself in this situation, follow the advice set forth in the rest of this section. We give many approaches to selecting a suitable subject and topic; one will work for you.
