English Composition

For additional assistance, contact Vicki Mills or Leslie Sult

Hot Topics

Topic Overviews

CQ Researcher
A good source for finding ideas for contemporary social, political & economic issues, includes background information about each issue.

Issues & Controversies
This database offers in-depth investigations of today’s top issues.  It provides an A-Z list of topics, a list of issues with pro and con arguments (this is a great feature) and a broad subject index.  Give this database a look, if you need ideas for a topic or if you need information about that topic.

Stateline.org     
Use this source to browse current news stories to generate research ideas. You can search this resource by individual state or on a national level.

Public Agenda Online
A great source for discovering and analyzing public opinion on a current topic. Each Guide contains and overview of the issue and background data including statistics from major public opinion polls in easy to understand graphs.

More Ideas for Topics

Open Democracy 
Look at the Themes section of this site – browse the different issues within each broad theme. 

Santa Ana College’s Controversial Issues
St. Ambrose University’s Hot Paper Topics
These are two sites that list some current controversial or hot paper topic issues with links to websites that inform about these issues.  These are other place to look for ideas for topics.

Representative American Speeches

These volumes have important speeches from the late 1930s to the present. Reading some of the speeches or just reading the titles of them might give you ideas for a topic. You would have to come into the library and find the volumes, in order to browse them.

99 Jumpstarts to research : topic guides for finding information on current issues 
This electronic book is a good source for getting ideas for a topic. Just select the preview option and look through the table of contents to get topic ideas.