Narrow a broad interest into a specific, researchable question, and draft a working thesis that will guide, and can be revised by, the research process.
A documented research paper begins not with a topic but with a question specific enough to actually be answered in the space of one paper. "Beowulf and heroism" is a topic; "How does the dragon episode's elegiac tone complicate Beowulf's status as a straightforward hero?" is a research question -- specific, answerable, and pointed toward a genuine argument rather than a general report. The same narrowing skill practiced all year on literary thesis statements applies here, with one addition: a research question has to be answerable using sources that actually exist and that you can actually find, read, and evaluate in the time available.
From the research question, draft a working thesis: your best current answer, understood explicitly as provisional. Unlike the thesis you might write for a shorter in-class essay, a research thesis is expected to change, sometimes significantly, as real sources complicate or contradict your first instinct -- this is the recursive writing process from Unit 1, now applied at the scale of a multi-week project. A student who refuses to let evidence revise a working thesis usually ends up cherry-picking sources to fit a predetermined conclusion instead of actually researching anything, which is both intellectually dishonest and, in practice, produces a weaker paper.
Mastery looks like: They can narrow a broad topic into a specific, answerable research question and draft a provisional working thesis they understand may need to change.
Common stumbles: Choosing a research question too broad to answer in one paper, or so narrow that no source material exists; treating the working thesis as fixed and unchangeable rather than genuinely provisional.
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Interactive, spoken-aloud tools that show this idea in motion.