1. Choose a topic that you care about enough to sustain your interest throughout this course.
2. Develop an argument based on quantifiable (or measurable) reasons.Though you can still appeal to emotion, you need to base your argument on facts and concrete evidence. In other words, you can't argue, for example, that smoking is wrong just because you grew up with a parent who smoked and you hate the smell of smoke. You can, though, argue for a smoking ban using reasons based on fact, such as the healthcare costs of secondhand smoke or the reduction in litter since in cities that have banned smoking.
3. Choose a topic about which you can be the expert and one that really lets your active voice be the dominant tone among the source material. You may wish to choose a topic related to your field of study, for instance, about which you wish to know more.
4. Here are some topics that rarely work well:Abortion (for or against)
5. Issues surrounding gun ownership (for or against)
6. Capital punishment (for or against)

The above topics often fail because the students who choose them are unable or unwilling to consider other perspectives and because they often copied. There are hundreds (thousands?) of free papers online that address these issues, and sometimes the temptation to use these is too great for some students to resist.