Empoword

Part Three: Research and Argumentation 294 • Wikipedia: Go to the Wikipedia homepage and check out the “featured article” of the day, or choose “Random Article” from the sidebar on the far left. Click any of the hyperlinks in the article to redirect to a different page. Bounce from article to article, keeping track of the titles of pages and sections catch your eye. • StumbleUpon: Set up a free account from this interest randomizer. You can customize what kinds of pages, topics, and media you want to see. • An Instagram, Facebook, reddit, or Twitter feed: Flow through one or more social media feeds, using links, geotags, user handles, and hashtags to encounter a variety of posts. After stumbling, review the list you’ve made of potentially interesting topics. Are you already familiar with any of them? Which surprised you? Are there any relationships or intersections worth exploring further? From these topics and subtopics, try to articulate a viable and interesting research question that speaks to your curiosity. Make sure its scope is appropriate to your rhetorical situation; you can use the exercise “Focus: Expanding and Contracting Scope” later in this chapter to help expand or narrow your scope. Focus: Expanding and Contracting Scope At this point, you have hopefully identified some topic or path of inquiry for your research project. In order to experiment with scope, try complicating your research question(s) along the different dimensions in the following table. A completed table is included as an example after the blank one.