David Hackett Fischer’s book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward A Logic of Historical Thought (1970, pages 38-39). Solid principles to keep in mind even in the humble endeavor of writing an undergraduate history paper.
David Hackett Fischer’s six affirmative axioms about question posing:
1) A proper historical question must be operational — which is merely to say that it must be resolvable in empirical terms.
This simple requirement has been elevated into an ism by philosophers who speak of “operationism,” or “operationalism,” and define it as “the demand that the concepts of terms used in the description of experience be framed in terms of operations which can be unequivocally performed.” But this is merely a common-sense notion.
2) A question should be open-ended, but not wide-open.
It should dictate the kinds of facts which will serve to solve a problem, without dictating the solution itself. It must be a genuinely interrogative statement, but at the same time it must guide the inquiry through masses of information. If it does not perform the latter function, the historian will share Alice’s confusion, as she went a-wandering in Wonderland:
“Cheshire-Puss,” she began, rather timidly . . . . “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—“said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
One way to balance the difficult dual requirement of freedom and control is to begin with a cluster of questions, and for each of them, a cluster of answers which are generated by hunches and preliminary explorations and refined into alternative hypotheses, which can be enlarged or altered as research may require. These clusters of questions and hypotheses can and indeed must be designed in such a way as to neutralize a predisposition to actualize any one of them. There is no other way to keep honest and at the same time to keep one’s momentum through masses of source of material.
3) A question should be flexible.
A historian must learn to resist that form of debilitation which has been called “hardening of the categories.” He must learn to conceive his questions and hypotheses as approximations, which are open to infinite refinement. A question cannot be framed wholly from historical sources—a historian must start with something. But it can be adjusted and amended, revised and ramified.
4) A question must be analytical, which is to say that it must help a historian to break down his problem into its constituent parts, so that he can deal with them one at a time.
It has been wisely and wittily observed that 'the only practical problem is what to do next. A proper question must serve to assist in this process, by separating sequential steps of inquiry."
5. A question must be both explicit and precise.
Its assumption and implications must be spelled out in full detail, not merely for the sake of the reader, but for the sake of the researcher himself. Nothing is more deleterious and more absurd that the common tendency of some historians to confuse open-mindedness with imprecision, and flexibility with befuddlement, and wisdom with obscurity.
6) A question must be tested.
No hypothesis can be conceived as “empirically verifiable” except in the degree to which it is verified. 'Questions are not put by one man to another man, in the hope that the second man will enlighten the first man’s ignorance by answering them,' wrote R. G. Collingwood. "They are put, like all scientific questions, by the scientist himself."
Source: Defining a Research Question