What you should avoid when selecting essay topics for middle school
While you are still in school, you may not be used to selecting the topic yourself. In school teachers tend to specify all the requirements, open assignments are more common for higher educational level. If you are confronted to this problem, you must be lost at first. Don't worry, practice makes perfect and you will nail choosing a topic easily soon enough. In the meanwhile, to get you started from the right track, here are the points it is better to avoid when choosing a topic for your paper.
- Your personal relationship. As this will have to look like an academic paper, there cannot be any emotional information included. This will include your friendship and relationship. Though you might talk about the meaning of them in general, or some problems connected to them, you shall not take it too personally.
- Problems in your family. This comes along with the previous point. Though these problems may seem like very important to you and worth seeing for everyone, or you just want to prove you are right is such an unusual way, this is still not a good idea. If you want to learn how to write a good academic paper, you need to write about things that will matter to your readers and will be useful for future researches.
- Turning the essay in part of your personal diary. Summing up the previous two reasons, your paper shall not be just about you (if this is not a personal application essay, of course).After all, imagine that your paper will be written not just by your teacher, but will be available in a library and everybody will have access to it. Is your topic something you would like everybody to find out about?
- Controversial topics: religion, immigration, discrimination etc. Though they seem like perfect topics you can find a lot of information about, they will be not that good by a closer look. There are too many opinions on them and almost none of them can be considered incorrect. You will never know what is the point of view of your teacher and if your paper won't be insulting, even if you try to word it politely.
- Modern world problems and simple solutions to them. First of all, this is one of the most common topics selected by students and it is quite hard to find something new to write about. More than that, the paper will most likely be too abstract and won't have any practical appliance, which is quite important for academic writing.