Your topic needs to be focused enough so that you can research it and write about it in the number of pages required by your assignment. Term papers are often 10-15 pages. If the class is the American Civil War, you cannot cover the entirety of the war in that amount of space. Phrasing your topic as a research question can be helpful. For example, if you are interested in looking at the role of women in the war effort, a possible research question could be "How did women on the homefront contribute to the war effort?" The document below is a worksheet that can help you formulate your topic as a research question. There is also an explanation and video about concept maps, which can be useful in thinking about your topic and narrowing it from a broad idea to something more manageable for a research paper.