Governing Question

The Governing Question is not your thesis or what you hope to demonstrate. Rather, it specifies what you need to investigate to make progress in your project and 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..." Having a clear Governing Question should keep your attention focused on what you need to find out that you do not already know or cannot 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 prioritise what you read, whom you speak to, and, in general, what you do in your project.

Any gap between the Governing Question and the Paragraph Overview probably points to unresolved issues about your subject, purpose, and audience. A useful habit to help monitor this: 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. Doing so helps remind you to check that what you are writing sticks to what you intended or claimed to be writing about—You should not leave it for your advisor or another reader to point out discrepancies. If the Governing Question and what you are writing do not match, something has to be re-envisioned.

(see Phase A)