The hardest part of an essay is usually not the writing but deciding what to argue. Staring at a broad topic produces nothing; asking a specific question about it produces material immediately.
Enter your topic and this tool asks twelve questions about it from different directions — definition, cause and effect, comparison, stakeholders and critique. Most will not suit your essay. Two or three will.
Unstructured brainstorming tends to circle the obvious. Prompting from fixed directions forces you past the first idea — which is usually the one every other student in the class also had.
The critique angles in particular tend to produce the most arguable material, because they ask what the standard account assumes without arguing for it. That gap is often exactly where an essay worth reading lives.
Two tests. First, can you support it with evidence you can actually get? An excellent angle with no accessible sources is not usable in a coursework essay.
Second, do you already know the answer? If so, writing it will be tedious and the result will read as a foregone conclusion. The angle where you genuinely have to work out what you think usually produces the better essay.
One angle argued properly beats four surveyed. The most common cause of a shallow essay is a scope too wide for the word count, which forces every point to be made in two sentences and none to be made well.
As a rough guide, a 2,000-word essay supports about three developed body points. If your chosen angle needs more than that, narrow it further before you start writing rather than discovering the problem at 1,800 words.
Turn the angle into a single arguable sentence — your thesis. If you cannot state it in one sentence, the angle is still too broad.
Then outline: three body points that each support the thesis, with a note on the evidence for each. Discovering at the outline stage that a point has no evidence behind it costs you five minutes; discovering it mid-draft costs considerably more.
Pick the one you can support with evidence you can obtain, and prefer the question you do not already know the answer to.
About three developed body points for 2,000 words. Fewer, developed properly, beats more covered thinly.
Narrow by population, setting or time period. "Social media" becomes "how Instagram use affects sleep among first-year undergraduates".
No. The questions are fixed prompts applied to the words you enter, so nothing about your topic is invented.
Turn your chosen angle into a one-sentence thesis, then build an outline with three supporting points and the evidence for each.