- Why is a topic already picked when the page loads?
- Because that is the job. You arrived with a blank page and a deadline, not with a desire to configure a tool. The topic is on screen the moment the page finishes loading, and the three filters sit above it if you want to narrow things down. If the first one doesn't suit, New topic is one press away. Nothing here asks you to start by telling it about yourself.
- What makes these different from a list of topic ideas?
- Phrasing. Most topic tools return bare nouns — 'technology', 'sport', 'the environment' — which leaves you exactly where you started, because the hard part was never picking a noun. Every entry here is already a usable statement. Pick Debate and you get a motion you could put to a room: 'This house would tax companies that replace workers with automation'. Pick Essay and you get a question with two defensible sides: 'Is a university degree still worth the debt?'. Pick Speech and you get a title: 'Why we should be teaching failure in schools'.
- What does the Purpose filter actually change?
- The grammar of what you get back. A debate needs a proposition somebody can oppose, so debate entries are written as motions. An essay needs a question you can answer over several paragraphs, so essay entries end in a question mark. A speech needs a title that tells an audience why to listen. A presentation topic names a thing you will explain, and a blog topic usually promises something concrete. Setting Purpose to Any mixes all five, which is fine when you are still deciding what form the work will take.
- How many topics are in the pool?
- 312, spread evenly across twelve subjects at 26 each — so no subject is more than about 8% of the pool and you won't get five technology topics in a row. There are at least 40 topics behind every purpose, so narrowing to Debate or Blog doesn't leave you re-rolling the same handful. The line under the card tells you how many topics your current filters are picking from.
- What is the angle line under each topic?
- One way into the topic, in eight to fifteen words. A topic on its own can still leave you staring — 'Should we send humans to Mars?' is a fine question, but where do you start? The angle says: robots do the science cheaper, so argue what the humans are actually for. It isn't the whole argument and it isn't meant to be. It's the first sentence of a plan, which is usually the part that takes longest.
- How does the Level filter work?
- It matches exactly rather than reaching upward. Choosing College returns college topics only, not school topics too. Topics that genuinely suit two levels are tagged at the lower one, so a school filter is a little more generous than it looks. The distinction is about what the audience is assumed to already know and how contested the claim is — a school debate motion should be arguable without a reading list.
- Will it give me the same topic twice in a row?
- No, as long as your filters leave more than one topic in the pool. Each press of New topic excludes whatever is currently on screen, so the next one is always different. The exception is a filter combination that matches exactly one topic, in which case you get that topic every time — which is the honest answer rather than an endless search for a second option that doesn't exist.
- What if my filters match nothing?
- You get a plain message — Nothing matches those filters. Loosen one and try again — and the New topic button switches off. No empty card, no word 'undefined'. A few combinations genuinely have nothing behind them: there are no school-level presentation topics in technology, for instance, because those entries sit at college and professional level. Putting one filter back to Any almost always fixes it.
- Can I get more than one topic at a time?
- Set Count to 3 or 5 and you get that many distinct topics, never the same one twice in a round. That's the mode to use when you have to submit three options to a teacher, or when a group needs something to vote on. If your filters leave fewer topics than you asked for, you get everything that matches rather than a padded list with repeats. Dropping Count back to 1 keeps the first topic and clears the rest.
- Is the pick actually random?
- Yes, and evenly so. Picks come from your browser's crypto.getRandomValues, the same source password generators use, rather than Math.random. A 32-bit random number can't be divided evenly into 312 parts, so the leftover values are discarded and a new number drawn — that's rejection sampling, and it means no topic gets even a fractional head start over any other.
