Hello, again readers! This week’s reading The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth was eye-opening for me. Now that I am in college I will be responsible for picking my own topics that I find exciting and having to research it, instead of being given a strict prompt from my teachers.

I find this both exciting and scary, I will now be given the opportunity to deep dive and write about topics that I personally care about. But that also leaves a lot of struggle in picking a topic to research, because topics are literally so broad. Throughout high school, I’ve only done one real research article, and that was on the negative effects of human cloning. Although I really enjoyed writing the OP-Ed sort of research project, the project was very guided and controlled by our teacher.

One thing I really enjoyed about this reading was how informative it was, research and picking topics aren’t very easy at times. But Booth gives different examples and tips on finding research topics. One of the ones I will definitely take with me is having "a list of topics, [and then] choose one or two that interest you" (Booth 37). Even though this is an easy tip, it is a very important one because it still allows for me to pick a list of a whole bunch of stuff that interest me first, then worry about lowering it to one or two topics later. This is helps someone like me who hasn’t written many research papers, go into it a little less intimidated, because there are so many ways that you can find issues and problems that relate to something I’m interested in.