How to Choose an Essay Topic? Avoid These 7 Mistakes

Choosing an essay topic is a critical decision you need to make to excel in any academic assignment. If you fail to choose the right essay topic, you may end up with a poorly done assignment that will negatively impact your readers and image. Therefore, paying attention to this process and choosing a title that will achieve your assignment’s goal is important. Being aware of and avoiding crippling blunders will help you much in the choosing process. This post will explore some mistakes you must avoid while choosing an essay topic for your writing assignments. After that, you can read our guide on how to write an essay.

Choosing an Essay Topic without Mistakes

How to Choose an Essay Topic

1. Leaning towards bad judgment

No matter how you think you are “creative and controversial,” you need to understand that we have some areas you need to keep off. For example, if you are writing about a topic touching on something morally or legally unacceptable, you cannot approach it positively. For instance, you cannot choose a topic that glorifies drugs or prostitution and expect it to go down well with your instructors unless they are sex pests or drug barons/addicts!

2. Sharing your dirty past

This point is worth noting if you are writing a personal narrative or an application essay that requires you to give your life experiences, including failures. No matter how “open” you want to be in your writing, avoid sensitive areas such as your past criminal records and behavior because you will end up writing bad college essays. You can only include them if you are sure that the information is in public knowledge and you are approaching it to show how you overcame and learned from them.

3. Failing to ask the right questions

Among the mistakes students make when choosing their research paper or essay topics, the most popular one is failing to ask relevant questions. It is not strange to get a prompt that may require you to get further clarification from your instructors before coming up with an appropriate topic. If you approached your paper without clarification, you could have gotten it by asking the right questions, and you would end up with the wrong or weak topic. If you fail to ask questions, you will miss much relevant information that could have helped you brainstorm.

4. Getting too personal

Another blunder you must avoid while selecting your paper’s title is getting too personal. Do not choose topics that can reveal your sensitive and confidential information to the outside world. For example, it will be unwise to select a topic that touches upon sensitive details regarding your sexuality. Failing to draw this boundary will portray you as a moral pervert or a careless individual without respect for personal privacy. Besides, such a reckless blunder will make your essay border obscenity.

5. Failing to read the prompt carefully

Another grave mistake that will cripple your essay topic selection process is failing to read your prompt well. If you do not take the time to read your essay question properly, you will most likely select the wrong topic. Even if you choose the right one, you can end up with a topic you may not discuss thoroughly. Failing to analyze your essay prompt will deny you the necessary information to help in the selection process because you won’t see the big picture.

6. Taking an offensive and controversial angle

Another blunder to avoid is selecting an essay topic that will lead you to a lengthy discussion touching on a controversial area. Good examples of such topics are those related to religious debates, politics, and abortion. If you delve into such an area, you will portray yourself as a “closed-minded zealot” trying to force others into accepting their ideologies. If you want to discuss politics, an essay is the wrong platform because you can exercise your constitutional rights and discuss it in a political gathering.

7. Getting too broad

The last goof to avoid when choosing an essay topic is choosing a topic that is too wide to exhaust within your stipulated word count. If you choose an essay topic that requires more wording to defend its thesis statement and help your reader understand it, you can confuse the reader. The reason is that in the absence of sufficient evidence, you will present your readers with half-baked information that may not convince them of the merit of your thesis statement.

Summing up

When choosing an essay topic, approach it with care and discretion. Once you fail to get it right here, your whole essay will shape your erroneous topic. Avoid all the blunders we discussed in this post to make your essays compelling.

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