Mat-Su College: Writing

This page covers what makes a good topic for your paper, as well as different tools that list topics and collect valuable sources on those topics:

• Opposing Viewpoints
• CQ Researcher
• Points of View Reference Center

You can click the links to immediately access these sources. Read below for more information on how to use each one.

Opposing Viewpoints lists controversial subjects. For each subject, there is a single page that collects magazine articles, newspaper articles, journal articles, opinion pieces, and so on. It's a great tool for finding a topic and then learning about it. It will help you find "for" and "against" articles for your paper.

Within Opposing Viewpoints you can access the list of topics by clicking "Browse Issues":

Click on any issue you're interested in:

Each issue has a topic page that collects all sorts of material that you can use in a paper:

CQ Researcher provides comprehensive reports on many controversial or recent topics.

You can move around the CQ Researcher website by clicking "Browse Topics," then picking a topic from a list:

You can also use the search box in the top right. The video tutorial below will teach you more about searching in CQ Researcher and about using its reports.

This short (2 minutes, 29 seconds) video shows how to search in CQ Researcher and how a report is structured.

Points of View Reference Center is a database that covers controversial subjects currently in the news.

In Points of View Reference Center you will see a page with a search bar and a list of controversial subjects grouped by category. Just glancing at this list can help you pick a topic. For example, in the screenshot below I see "drilling in the Arctic" as a topic:

If I want more information, I can click a topic's name.

Once I've clicked it, I get a nice overview of the subject (indicated by 1 in the screenshot below) as well as links to further sources of information (indicated by 2 in the screenshot below):