For my college English class we have to do a major research paper. That is not the problem, the problem is my teacher set no guidelines! I have no idea what to research!!! Any tips on how to narrow down ideas to find a good topic?

Ick, I'd rather shoot myself in the foot with a nail gun than do another research paper (although I think we have to do one 2nd semester... now where'd I put those nails?). I did mine on cults, and that was pretty interesting. My teacher gave us a sheet of suggestions for topics, I wish I still had it. Some things I can think of off the top of my head would be drug use in sports, teen suicide, gang activity, mental disabilities, serial killers, alcoholism, umm.... gosh, my brain isn't working today...

We have to do one for my dual-credit Comp 101/ English 4 class... my topic is the Federal Communcations Commission. Other topics I considered were the Israel/ Palestine conflict, Foreign Policy, and the War On Drugs. Those three have tons of information on them(and are related), so if any of them sound interesting, check 'em out.

ever participate in national history day? (ten page history papers are awesome! :ermm: ) there are tons of history topics too, just pick something you reeeeally like or can pretend you like so you can write a whole lot easily.

Research papers...can't stand them, but they're slightly better than essay tests and other painful projects. Sophomore year, i wrote one on Mao Zedong and his rule in China; junior year i went with a paper on astrology. This year, my "internal assessment" is going to be about the downfall of the Hawaiian monarchy and the annexation of the islands.

Depending on how long you have to do it, you could read a book and think of some unresolved (more or less) topic in the story that you could research and explain.

I did one like that (by assignment) on Dune - a very good book. I had to classify the book as realism, modernism, romanticism, naturalism, etc. and do a research paper justifying that claim.
You could experiment with that.

all the college history kids are supposed to enter in the National History Day competition so i just went with the topic easiest for me to research and find good resources for. being a resident of Harry S Truman's hometown and going to Truman high school encouraged me to learn a bit more about the guy, not to mention i live about 20 minutes away from the Truman library and Truman home. If you're all about semi easy things that are still interesting i'd stick with something local. theres always that pride factor in knowing about your own town. and you could probably get primary sources which are like the golden ticket in research things. or so says mr peck. but he also says that oswald killed kennedy so....

I've done History Day for the past 6 years and i'm planning on doing it again this year(individual performance) so I could recycle one of my topics for this paper. Or I could get a completely new topic that deals with this years theme (exploration, encounter, exchange) and use my research to become familiar with my topic for this years HD. To make the paper easy or make HD easy, a delemma. :/