GoverningQuestion

=Governing Question= (see Phase A)

The Governing Question is not your thesis, but what you need to investigate to make progress in your project. It should be expressed in a way that orients your work, e.g., "In what ways can approaches for effectively teaching empathy-based personal interaction be combined into a course for employees and managers?" or "What do I need to know to influence people who prescribe or seeks drugs for behavioral modification of children?" or "What teachers, theories, organizations, examples can provide models for me to experiment with and make my own so that..." The Governing Question should focus you on what you need to find out that you don't already know or can't yet demonstrate to someone else. It should be grounded in what __you__ need to know to get engaged in your specific circumstances, not what some generic person ought to know. Keeping the Governing Question in mind as you do research will also help guide you through the complexity of possible considerations so that you more easily decide priorities about what to read, who to speak to, and, in general, what to do in your project.

The gap between the Governing Question and the Paragraph Overview is often a very good diagnostic of unresolved issues about your subject, purpose, and audience. When you write about your project--whether at the early stages, such as in an Annotated Bibliography, or in the later stages of preparing a draft report--put your Governing Question at the top of your first page, like a banner; this helps remind you to check that what you are writing sticks to what you intended or claimed to be writing about—You're not waiting for another reader to point out discrepancies. If the Governing Question and what you are writing don't match, something has to be reconsiderePr