Research Questions & Topic Refinement

Research questions are questions that help a writer narrow a very broad topic to a very specific topic. This can be considered topic refinement because topic refinement takes a general idea that the author wants to talk about and then it looks at the different aspects of that idea and weeds out the ideas that are unnecessary for the author's argument. These two things take time and effort to do, however, they are vital to the writing process. In order to refine your topic, you must ask questions about the argument and find any counterclaims that you may have missed. These questions also help to find new angles and ideas that may not have come up before, which is what validates the importance of the questions. By asking research questions about my topic and using them to refine my topic, my writing can improve by being more focused and more fluent.