Before you begin writing your paper, you have to develop general ideas about what topic you would like to address. Your teacher may narrow these topic ideas for you, but you will still have to develop specific ideas yourself. Begin by asking yourself what type of policy you're most interested in and then proceed to a series of questions or arguments about that policy. For example, if you're interested in foreign policy, you might wonder why it became United States policy to go to war in Iraq or initially to join the United Nations.
Once you have developed initial ideas and asked a few key questions you'd like to address, you can start narrowing your ideas by doing some research. If you're interested in domestic policy, begin by visiting with people who have been affected by the policy you're interested in. For example, if you're wondering what policies need to change in order for hospital emergency room waiting times to decrease, visit a waiting room at a hospital and speak with people who are waiting or with hospital administrators. These people may be able to identify key areas for you to pursue with argument. Once you have spoken with affected people, do more specific research, such as visiting a government agency's website, or reading journal articles and books about the policy.
Unlike the process for narrowing your ideas for a domestic policy argument paper, you might not be able to speak with people who are directly affected by foreign policy. However, you can speak with those who develop foreign policies, such as government officials and foreign aid workers. These people may be able to tell you how foreign policy affects people in other countries and give you vital statistics that will further your research. As you would with a domestic policy argument paper, use your conversations with foreign policy workers to narrow your focus even further. Find magazines, such as "Foreign Policy," department websites, such as the U.S. Department of State, and foreign affairs books to find key data and sources to cite in your paper.
Now that you have narrowed your focus to a key policy you're interested in and a specific question you would like to tackle, it's time to generate ideas about the organizational structure of your paper. The people you have spoken to and the reading you have done should guide this, but you still might need to focus the idea even further. For example, there may be dozens of policies that need to change to reduce emergency room waiting times, but you can't tackle all of them in your paper. Use arguments that you have concrete evidence to back up, and try to use arguments that build off previous ones in your paper. Taking the waiting times example again, you might believe that more doctors need to be hired to reduce waiting times, but if there aren't enough doctors graduating to fill these roles, address the issue of increasing medical school spaces first in your paper.