Oak Hill's Sr Projects: Why Create An Outline PPT#4

Editor's Notes

1. No matter what sort of document you wish to produce, you’re going to want to know how to write an outline first. Outlines are essential to help you gather your thoughts together and put them into a cohesive flow of ideas starting at point A, and then leading a trail to points B, C, and D. No matter what kind of document you are writing, success or failure depends solely onyour ability to make a clear and obvious presentation of your information. Your goal is to take your reader on a journey and deliver him/her to a logical conclusion. Think of an outline like you would a road map. With a road map, you can pinpoint the most direct route so you can make a bee line from the beginning to your destination. Or you could map out a more scenic route, just to add a few twists and turns to make the journey more interesting. In either case, your map will get you where you want to go without getting lost. Likewise, when you outline your presentation, you’ll know exactly where to start and where to end, and you’ll know the exact route to get there with either the least amount of trouble or with a few side points of interest along the way.
2. Do your research. How much research should you do before you start your outline? At the very least you should have done enough to come up with a tentative thesis statement and to have a grasp of the broad main points that will be required to support your thesis. If you have just these, you can then fill in the rest of the outline as you do your research. You can’t write an outline until you know more or less what you are going to talk about. Determine the paper’s thesis and its audience and purpose. All parts of the outline should be constructed and organized to support your thesis or central point. You have to have a sense of what you will argue in the paper. Consider the purpose of your paper and your intended audience so you’ll know what you need to include and what you can leave out. Choose your outline’s structure. Each entry in an outline can either be a word or short phrase without punctuation (a topic outline) or a full sentence with punctuation (a sentence outline). There are advantages to both, but the important thing is to choose one and stay consistent throughout the outline. Use a Roman number-letter-number outline form. Be consistent. Write down your main categories. The main categories are the key points of your thesis, the main divisions of your paper. Put your main categories in logical order. List the main categories in the order you want them in your paper. This may be chronological or thematical but it should make sense. Label each main category with a Roman numeral . Fill in the subcategories for each main category . Each main category of the paper may be composed of several paragraphs. Each subcategory typically correlates to one paragraph within your paper, but in a long paper each subcategory may include several paragraphs. You need at least two subcategories for each main category.Label each subcategory as a capital letter. Fill in the tetiary categories or sentences. Within each sub-category. List and arrange your specific notes to support or expand the argument or point made on that paragraph. The tertiary (third-level) categories will often correlate to the order of the sentences in each paragraph since each tertiary category should correlate to a distinct point or idea. Indent each tertiary category several spaces from the beginning of each subcategory and label each as a number. Continue adding smaller divisions as needed. The thesis and introduction will be the first category and the conclusion will be the last. Creating an outline before writing your paper will make organizing your thoughts a lot easier. Making an outline is always beneficial to your writing process. If your outline is good, your paper should be easy to write.
3. Introduction: State your thesis and the purpose of your research paper clearly. What is the chief reason you are writing the paper? Ste how you plan to approach your topic. Explain briefly the major points you plan to cover in your paper and why readers should be interested in your topic. Body: This is where you present your arguments to support your thesis statement. Rembmer the Rule of 3—find three supporting agruments for each position you take. Begin with a strong argument, then use a stronger one, and end with the strongest argument for your final point. Conclusion: Restate or reword your thesis. Summarize your arguments. Explain why you have come to this particular conclusion.
4. A good outline enhances the organization and coherence of your paper. The outline can help you organize your material, stay focused, be clear, discover connections between pieces of information that you weren’t aware of, make you aware of material that is not really relevant to the purposes of your paper, help you fill in the gaps, etc.