 My name is Demra Hayes and I'm from the Air Force Research Institute at Air University. Welcome to our video series, Academic Writing for Airmen, and today I'll be talking about how to answer the question, what do I write about? In some cases, of course, your topic will be assigned, even if your topic is assigned, you'll still have to go through the process of developing a thesis or developing an argument. Today's video talks about those cases where your topic is not assigned, not predetermined. So I want to give you a set of questions that will help you think about a topic and maybe generate a topic. Number one, what are the current and important issues in your field? What are people talking about right now? What important conversations are taking place among scholars or among practitioners in the field? What conversation do you want to join? Number two, what are the major questions being asked by experts or practitioners? What is unknown that needs to be known? What is controversial? What are you an expert on? Where can you lend your knowledge? On the other hand, you could ask yourself, what do you need to know more about? You can use a writing assignment as an opportunity to do research and to learn more about something that you need to know. Another question, what are the pressing problems in your field and what might the solutions be for those problems? What new or emerging issue should people be talking about? Maybe you want to steer the conversation in a new direction. What looming problem needs to be mitigated? Of course, these questions are only tools to help you get started thinking about a topic. The topic that you eventually write on may not have anything to do with these questions. Ideally, your writing will emerge out of your intellectual engagement with the field, whatever field you're studying, whether it's leadership and strategy or Asia-Pacific studies or counter insurgencies or whatever. If you want to be an effective writer, you have to be engaged in your field so that you know what the issues are, you know what other people are saying and you're ready to join a conversation that's already underway. Good scholarly writers never write in a vacuum. So here are some strategies that I would suggest just for beginning to get engaged in your field of study and laying the intellectual foundation for good writing. First identify and read the important journals in your field. Identify the key scholars in your field and of course you want to read their published research, but also follow them on social media or their blogs to keep up with what they're doing currently. If you're studying a field that is in the news, identify the key journalists who write about your field and follow their work as well. Look for calls for papers. You'll find these in journals. There may also be a listserv or a website where calls for papers in your field are regularly posted. Your professors who know the field will be able to help you find these. Also scan agendas of recent conferences in your field to see what conversations were taking place at those conferences. Stop frequently by the new bookshelves in your academic library and see what topics are covered in the books that have just been released in academic fields. Also ask your professors what they do to stay current. The chances are you're already following some of these practices, especially if you're a graduate student, and maybe you already have some ideas about topics that you might be interested in. For example, nuclear deterrence in the post-Cold War era might be a broad topic that you're interested in or cyber anti-terrorism tools or maybe how interagency operations are organized for disaster response, for example, or the decline of al-Qaeda. But those topics are broad and they don't really give you a lot of direction about where to go next in the writing process. So what you need are a set of research questions about the topic you're interested in that will help you narrow your focus. Now, unfortunately, I can't give you a formula for research questions because it will really vary depending on your topic. So what I want to do is just take an example, a sample topic, and I'll tell you some research questions that I would use to get me started if I were doing research in that field. So here's a topic that I've seen discussed a lot in the media, particularly after Osama bin Laden was killed, that is the decline of al-Qaeda. So if I were interested in doing research about that, I would start by brainstorming a list of questions. And the first question I would ask is, is it really declining? And I would follow that with the question, in what ways is al-Qaeda declining? Number three, who says that this decline is taking place? Is this coming from the American intelligence establishment or from the military or from our allies? And number four, what's the proof? How do we know? How do we measure its decline? Number five, when did it start declining? Number six, on the other hand, are there ways in which it's growing stronger, or at least holding its own? Is its influence declining in some places, but not in others? And if it is declining, what has caused that? Can we do anything to make it decline further? And how should its decline affect U.S. policy? And notice that the first five questions are fact-finding questions, just trying to establish the facts about al-Qaeda's decline. Six and seven are, on the other hand, kind of questions. These kinds of questions probe to see if there are any counter-arguments against the basic premise that al-Qaeda is in decline. Number eight is an analysis question. What explains the facts? And a nine and ten are emphasized on your screen for a very important reason. It's in these questions that you find the seeds of an argument. Can the United States do anything to make al-Qaeda become even less influential? Should we change any of our policies in the war on terror, or change any of our priorities, if this reported decline is true? So I hope you can hear that the answers to those last couple of questions would be arguments. Remember that academic essays make an argument, so your thesis expresses that argument. Selecting a topic doesn't automatically give you an argument. You have to keep asking questions, the kinds of questions that I just gave you, until you get to a question whose answer is, in fact, an argument. So selecting a broad topic about which to do research, about which to ride and do research is one step in the writing process. But you're eventually going to have to arrive at a clearly defined, precise, arguable thesis. And that may be the most important part of the writing process. So we'll address that carefully in another video. I would love to hear from you. As always, please use the emails that you see on the screen to tell us how these videos are helping you to suggest improvements or to request additional writing topics. Thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time.