For my research paper, I will discuss drug abuse. More specifically, people who abuse drugs and ways to fix this issue. Nowadays drugs are considered the new norm, but no one actually realizes the damage drug abuse actually cause. In my research, I’ll focus more on the negative impact drugs could have on a person and I hope to find ways to help stop the abuse of drugs.
The Essential Content of the Article: This article focuses on what substance abuse is, where it comes from, and all of the issues it cause to the body. It doesn’t just focus on bad drugs, it also discusses good drugs, drugs that treats illnesses.
What it proves: This article will help me prove how bad drugs actually are, and it’ll also helps me educate readers on how some drugs help people.
The Essential Content of the Article: This article focuses on prevention of adolescent drug abuse. It also discusses effects on drug use. The author lists prevention methods such as program interventions
What it proves: This article will help me prove ways to prevent drug abuse, list prevention methods, and it’ll also give more background information on drug abuse.
3. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1360-0443.2002.00038.x/full
The Essential Content of the Article: This article focuses on the effects of drug abuse prevention at school. They discuss a study that was put into several schools to examine the effect on drug use in the children exposed to it.
What it proves: This article will help me prove how drug abuse impacts a person.
4. http://journals.lww.com/co-obgyn/Abstract/2007/12000/The_effects_of_drug_abuse_on_pregnancy.13.aspx
The Essential Content of the Article: This article focuses on the effects of drug abuse on pregnancy outcome. Also, risk factors that substance abuse includes on pregnant women specifically.
What it proves: This article will help me to prove counter arguments on how substance abuse can have a serious impact on the baby of a pregnant women. This supports one of my main points by showing how bad drugs can actually be to the body.
5. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0899328995903097
The Essential Content of the Article: This article focuses on client engagement and change during drug abuse treatment and how it improves behavioral criteria and psychosocial functioning.
What it proves: This article will help me to prove how it is very possible to seek help to overcome drug abuse. This will help me give information to readers showing them what it is like getting help before, during treatment, and even after recovery.
Rowan Counterintuitive 
PhillyGirl, your research topic is too broad by a factor of 10 at least. From the MASSIVE topic of DRUGS, you’ve eliminated nothing. You want to tell readers about the BENEFITS and the DRAWBACKS of drugs. You want to address both PREVENTION and WITHDRAWAL. You want to explore drug programs for ADOLESCENTS IN SCHOOLS, and for PREGNANT WOMEN. You want to explore ADDICTION, TREATMENT, and POST-RECOVERY THERAPY.
Any one of these topics alone would be too big for 3000 words.
Taken together, they couldn’t be covered in a series of books. Are you afraid to narrow your topic? Do you think you’ll run out of things to say about a specific thesis? I understand. I’m sympathetic. But I can’t let you waste the next eight weeks producing a document that explains nothing, accomplishes nothing.
Where’s the compelling incident, anecdote, tidbit of family history, razor-sharp indictment of flawed governmental policy, that will bring some life to this vague claim that “there’s a lot to say about drugs, most of it negative”?
Suppose, for example, you wanted to write about drug abuse by pregnant women. Nothing could be more counterintuitive than for a woman nurturing nascent life in her womb to willfully poison the blood she shares with her unborn fetus, risking the delivery of an addict baby. Even that’s too big for 3000 words, but a close examination of a program that has shown success convincing pregnant addicts to get clean at least long enough to deliver healthy babies (even if they return to drug abuse following the delivery) would be well worth a research paper.
WHILE YOU’RE DESCRIBING THAT PROGRAM, you could use material you have gathered from other sources: about the denial of abusers to admit the harm they inflict on themselves and others, about the value of reaching adolescents with information while they’re still in school before they pick up drugs or start having sex. ETC. Do you see the plan here?
Find your VERY NARROW focus first. Then, while attempting to describe it to readers, explain the causes and consequences of a single action or series of actions, you get to use a broad range of research materials. But the focus comes first.
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