Your job as the writer is to think through the relationship between your ideas. Here's what the student's second outline looked like: It clarifies the relationship between the major and minor points. It establishes the order and relationship of the main points.Her working outline isn't very formal, but it fulfills the functions of a good outline. She wanted to describe the three political theories and then compare them by using each to analyze the government of a particular country, arguing that neo-Marxism is the most useful theory. The student who wrote the tentative outline above also wrote the one below before beginning her essay. It helps you answer the question: How am I going to present my information, given my thesis, my assignment and my audience? The writer already knew about two of the theories, but needed more information about the third.ĭuring pre-writing, you can make a working outline-an outline that guides you in your drafting. Here is an example of a tentative outline a student used to begin doing research for an essay comparing three different political theories: neo-Marxism, pluralism, and elitism. This kind of outline helps you answer the questions: What do I know a lot about already? What do I need to research more? While you are researching a topic, you can make a tentative outline-a plan for your paper based on what you are learning from your research. At each stage, the outline serves a different function and helps you answer different writing questions: USING OUTLINES IN RESEARCH When you think of outlines, you usually think of an organizational plan to help you draft a paper, but you can outline at any one of the several stages of the writing process. An outline that accompanies the final draft of a paper can also function as a table of contents for the reader. Preparing an outline will help you think over your notes, consider them from several perspectives, and devise/revise an organizational plan appropriate to your topic, audience, and assignment. But longer papers are too big to organize mentally you generally need a more systematic plan to organize the various parts of the paper. For shorter, less complex papers, a few informal notes jotted down may be enough. Outlines usually grow out of working plans for papers. Regardless of the degree of formality, however, the function of an outline is to help you consider the most effective way to say what you want to say. Outlines range from an informal use of indenting and graphics (such as -, *, +) to a formal use of Roman numerals and letters. It indicates the main arguments for your thesis as well as the subtopics under each main point. An outline is a kind of graphic scheme of the organization of your paper. Many writers use an outline to help them think through the various stages of the writing process.
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