The Quest for Utopia: ENG 0824

Reference works -- like encyclopedias, handbooks, and dictionaries -- provide great overviews and background information. 

• They help you contextualize your topic and generate questions.
• They help identify keywords you can use later when searching for scholarly sources. 
• They contain bibliographies that lead you to the most respected secondary and most useful primary sources on a topic.

In short, reference works are a great way to begin your research. 

"Wikipedia? It's a great place to start, and a horrible place to end, at least that's what my professor says."

- PIL Progress Report 2/09

Wikipedia can be a great place to begin finding information on a topic, trend, or issue. You'll need to find additional sources, but Wikipedia articles may help you learn more about your topic. Use the citation list at the bottom of Wikipedia entry pages to lead you to more sources. 

Need to look up a name, place, term, or event?  The sources below contain many different kinds of encyclopedias and dictionaries and are excellent starting points for getting an overview on your topic as well as possible search terms to use later. Try them.

Now that you've done some background research, it's time to focus your topic. Here are some suggestions for narrowing and defining your topic:

• Is there a specific subset of the topic you can focus on?
• Is there a cause and effect relationship you can explore?
• Is there an unanswered question on the subject?
• Can you focus on a specific time period, geographic location, or group of people?

Applying the 5 W's -- who, what, when, where, why, and how -- to your topic can also help you begin to find a more focused issue within that topic that will work well for your assignment.

Describe and develop your topic in some detail. Try filling in the blanks in the following statements from Wayne Booth's The Craft of Argument so you can move from a big, broad topic to one that is interesting and manageable:

Try visualizing your topic to explore all of the different angles, ideas, and key concepts related to your topic. This is a good brainstorming exercise and can also help focus your topic into a research question.

The tools below can help you visualize your topic.