| Free Term Paper Ideas The most important problem you face in writing a term paper is choosing one of two approaches:
Plan A is almost guaranteed to lead to procrastination. "I really have to get on that term paper. Maybe an idea will appear tomorrow." The idea will not appear until the paper is due. You can count on it, and that is the only major advantage of Plan A. Plan B will get you started a lot faster if you actually want to get a term paper done. The remainder of this document assumes that you adopt Plan B. OK, so where do they keep the ideas? It depends on what kind of idea you are after. If you would like to work on material written at the level of Ph.D. economists with an understanding of graduate level mathematics, then try academic journals. If you would like to focus on material distilled down to the level of an eight grader waiting in a dentist's office, then try the weekly newsmagazines. A much better idea is serious policy discussion written at the level of a college graduate. An excellent source of such material is the CIS Index (Congressional Information Service), which is a printed abstracting service. A substantial fraction of the more recent material indexed in CIS is available online as LexisNexis Congressional. The online version is quicker, but you ultimately might have more success browsing the printed version because all the work of a given committee is easily visible in the printed version. Examples: A search under "price discrimination" yields 43 reports by Congressional committees and 224 Congressional hearings. A search under "monetary policy" yields 105 committee reports and 313 committee hearings. Neither of these topics is a good idea. They are much too broad. The most common mistake students make writing undergraduate term papers is taking on a topic that is too broad. Within the hundreds of documents listed, you want to find a more specific topic that you can deal with effectively. It is ok to search under broad terms, but pick something specific when you get to the point of writing a term paper. The best place to look for search keywords is the textbook for your course. Reports and hearings you find in the CIS Index have a great advantage in there is almost automatically an issue at stake. Congress simply does not devote much attention to things that are not important issues. Having an issue is important to you because you need something to write about. Good luck with your term paper. |