Do you need to create an argumentative essay based on the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, but don’t know how to proceed? Or perhaps you need to create a critical essay about developmental biology and its application to the social sciences? Sometimes, all you need is an essay topic generator tool! This article reviews two (2) of the top essay topic generator tools available today: Questia Topic Idea Generator and Essay Topics Generator.
Essay Topics Generator
Developed with the confused student in mind, using this tool is as easy as 1-2-3. Go to your browser and type in “http://essaytopicgenerator.com/“. The first page is minimalistic. You have the information about the website, the social icons, and of course, the search engine. At first glance, there is nothing special about this website. Or so I thought.
Because of the simplicity of the website’s layout, the actions you need to do to search for a topic idea is pretty obvious: first you have to type in your topic keyword, then choose kind of essay you want to create (through the topic type dropdown), and the subject where you will submit the article to (through the subject area dropdown). Hit the generate button and search for the topic that interests you, and begin writing your essay! To test the power of this tool, I pretended I wanted to write an argumentative essay for a Language and Literature class about Frankenstein. I received 25 results, but only the first two were directly related to the topic. But given the fact that this tool was just launched this year, I say the number of results I received were pretty impressive. At least, it wasn’t too numerous that I could get confused in choosing an essay topic, or not that few, hence allowing me enough choices for my essay.
Questia Topic Idea Generator
The Questia Topic Idea Generator is an integral component of the Writing Center by Cengage Learning. It has been helping students in generating topic ideas for over eight years now, and is trusted by many users because of its large repository of topic titles. Moreover, because it is attached to the Questia Research Center, the tool also provides the user with possible references for the essay, hence cutting down on research time.
When you go to the website, the first thing you will see is the search page. All you need to do is to type in the idea you have in mind, hit search and wait for the search results to come up. Sounds simple, right? I thought so, too, until I got the results which involved more than 11,000 resources.
While it is true that the resources were classified into three major topics: Frankenstein, Mary Shelley and Monster Movies, going in to one category will bring you to the resources available for the said category. In this case, choosing “Mary Shelley” as my category led me to a top 10 listing about the author. It’s true: Questia provides more topic ideas for a student, but in this case, I’m not entirely sure that this is an advantage.
Conclusion
Choosing an essay topic generator tool can be difficult because there are so many different types available today. For this essay, I have chosen to review the top 2 most utilized tools on the interent. Questia or Essay Topics Generator? Which one should you use? My answer is this: it all depends on what you want to do. In the table below, I have summarized the advantages and disadvantages of Questia Topic Generator and Essay Topics Generator to help you make your choice.
| Pros | Cons | |
| Questia | – created by a trusted educational institution – generates a huge listing of resources/references, cutting down on research time – huge listing of references provides unlimited topic ideas | – lists resources instead of actual topic, hence requiring the user to go through each resource to get a topic idea. – huge listing can cause even more confusion to the already confused student. |
| Essay Topics Generator | – homepage is simple, intuitive and userfriendly, focusing only on what the tool is for – provides topic titles to focus topic ideas – enables the writer to choose topic titles based on the kind of essay that needs to be written | – provides very few topic ideas – does not offer resources/references for the writing of the essay – developed recently, hence leading to very few website features |