When the instructor gave us a research assignment, I was nervous since I had not done it before. We were supposed to come up with our own topics and do a research on them. Open topics, while promising great freedom, are daunting because they don't provide any direction. I didn't have any idea of a topic to write about so I faced my friends and classmates who brainstormed me with hundreds of suggestions. Some seemed to be good while others were confusing. Considering the limit length of the essay, thousand words, I require a topic that was neither shallow nor so broad to be fully exploited within the limit.
             As I was struggling to go through my friends' ideas, a thought came into my mind, I had read from the newspapers the previous week that a certain religious group in my country had attacked and killed twenty people. Considering other cases of suicides associated with religious groups, I thought it would be good idea to research on how such groups develop and operate. I gave my research the title "Extreme Religious Groups".
             I knew that in a research paper I was supposed to present the results of my investigations on the topic, in a unique way, based on my own thoughts and the facts I would have gathered from various sources. After I chosen the topic, I had to decide whether I wanted my essay to be an argumentative or an informative paper. I chose the later since my main aim was to inform my readers how such groups develop, operate, and recruit their members. After I had found a center of interest, I needed to narrow the topic's scope to make it more manageable and specific and I did this by revising my thesis.
             I finally embarked on my research by looking information from any available sources like, reference books, magazines and journals, Internet and from interviews. My first source was the reference books which I thought could give me a very basic idea of my topic from which I would
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