Summaries of Harvard Writing Center Essays: The essay "Moving from Assignment to Topic" gives a few integral steps that students can take to find a topic to write about from a reading assignment. Students should be active in creating their own questions in regard to the text since writing is a unique opportunity for them to connect to the text and further their intellectual development. Next, students must find primary and secondary sources that would convincingly support their arguments pertaining to their own questions. Primary sources are those that are self-analyzed by the students themselves. Secondary sources are those that already analyzed the students' assigned reading text and is used as evidences without the students further analyzing them. It is encouraged for essays to be focused on one or more primary sources. After finding the supported evidences, students must take subjects and make them into topics. Subjects are usually very broad and could be "huge abstractions." On the other hand, topics are very particular. Examples of subjects would be "health" or "education." Meanwhile, examples of topics would be "the importance of exercise upon the health of adult males." Even after narrowing down a broad subject into topics, student writers must narrow down further the topics in order to get to one central topic that he/she could write about. Having a "sufficiently focused topic" and "specific topic" would help a writer in making a coherent argument. The essay "Overview of the Academic Essay" gives the key components of an academic essay. Firstly, an academic essay must have an original motive or purpose that would draw readers. It should be remembered that writing about something "trivial" or already widely known would be very boring and have no purpose since doing so would just be reciting previous works. A thesis is the main point that the writer makes and the essays must be tailor to support its validity. The thesis could be complex but must be clear enough for readers to understand its meaning and importance.
