How to arrive at the research paper questions that will help to write it well?

One of the ways of generating ideas about a topic is to dramatize it with questions. You can do it with six basic questions:

• What happened? (the action)
• Who was involved? (agents, spectators and other affected persons)
• When and where did it happen? (the setting)
• How did it happen? (the method)
• Why did it happen? (the cause or motive)
• What effect did it have? (the consequence)

The more questions you can think of, the more deeply you will plunge into the topic. Let us consider the sample process of research paper questions generation on the trial topic “the effect of acid rain on trees”. You can investigate the topic with the questions like these:

• What does acid rain do to trees? What happens to their leaves, bark, branches and roots?
• Who is responsible for acid rains? Which industries cause the highest amount of such rains? Who is affected by the damage that acid rain does to trees?
• When and where does acid rain affect trees? What parts of the world are most affected? How often does acid rain fall?
• How does acid rain develop? How is it transported to the forests?
• Why is acid rain threatening trees?
• What effect does the damage to trees have? How does it affect the timber supply, wildlife and people? What are the global results?

It will take up some reading time and research efforts to answer all of these questions. But when you dramatize your topic with questions, you are surely beginning to clarify it for yourself and for your future audience.

All of the questions can help you generate research material, and a good deal of this material may find its way into your essay. But just as you need to define your topic as elaborately as possible, you also need a basic question to help you define the key problem or conflict you will try to resolve. To focus on one basic question is also to see its relation to others. Research paper questions can bring out the conflicts inherent in any topic worth writing about, and once you move to the topics outside your personal experience, you will often find conflicts of opinions or belief. When you get a question to be answered, you get a problem to be solved – the kind of problem that can generate an essay.

Once you’ve chosen the basic question you plan to pursue, you can choose other research paper questions that will help you to focus your paper within the rigid investigation framework.

Before you start writing, find someone you can talk to about the basic question you plan to explore. If you already have some possible answer, your listener may give you a different answer. Hearing it will make you more sensitive to the complexity of your subject, more skillful in anticipating potential misunderstandings or objections to your point of view, and therefore more effective and efficient in explaining or defending it.