Planning Papers: Skeletons and Strategies
If your plan will be presented in traditional outline form, please type it (double-spaced).
If you are using a less traditional design, please sketch it out using pen rather than pencil.
Why do you need to take the time to make a plan? Why not just sit down and start writing? This is a very busy time in the semester, andwe all have other major deadlines looming.
Here’s why: Paper 2is a weighty component of your final grade (20 %), and you can’t risk starting this complex writing project the night before it’s due!
So please consider the analogy of building a house. You may start thinking about the project by saying, “I’ve always wanted a three-bedroom home.” But you wouldn’t dream of trying to build that home—a huge investment!–without a blueprint.
Your architect and builder need to know if all three bedrooms will be on the same level;
if one bedroom will be a more spacious master bedroom; if any or all bedrooms need their own bathroom; even if you like to wake up to morning sunshine!
That house blueprint is almost certain to change as you refine your plans for your house. Builders have a saying: “It’s cheaper to change the blueprint than to move the kitchen after the house is built.” While drawing up a blueprint can be a tedious process, it forces you to make fundamental design decisions before you make a much bigger investment in your building project. It imposes a reality check on impractical ideas, but it often generates creative new options that meet your needs while staying within your budget.
Revising your blueprint helps you refine your priorities and build the house you really want. Similarly, planning your paper saves you time, stress, and intellectual energy.
One benefit of a plan is that it can lay out your paper in terms of individual sections to be completed according to your personal schedule.A well-designed plan can help you divide a big project into a series of smaller tasks, and thus make a major assignment more manageable and less overwhelming.
SO, what you should keep in mind while planning this or any other writing project?
1) The form/format of your plan is up to you—any sort of schematic that shows the relationship of part to whole in your paper. Some writers like outlines, some use “idea trees” or “thought bubbles” or skeletons or diagrams with boxes and arrows—it really doesn’t matter what structure you choose.
But keep in mind that making a plan is a structural step beyond jotting down ideas or simply listing the elements you want to include in your paper.Arandom series of sentences is not the same as a plan because that simply represents the pre-planning stage we call “brainstorming,” gathering ideas before organizing them into meaningful patterns. (The same is true of a rambling paragraph that simply free-associates about a research topic.)
2) Your plan needs to be specific to your paper.The plan cannot simply name the sections of the paper in a generic, predictable order. For example, everybody’s Introduction comes first! Nor can yousimply use vague terms andspace holders like “Idea One,” “Example Two,” “Next Claim,”etc. Your plan must be tailor made to your own unique paper, rather than “One Size Fits All.”
Here is an example: your plan should indicate at a glance how many claims you will be including in your paper, the reason each claim presents, and the order in which you will present them.
This means that you need to know the actual ideas you are trying to organizebefore you make your plan. In other words, if you haven’t learned enough about your issue to know what specific points you will want to include in your paper, you’re not yet ready to draw up a plan that will present your own argument most effectively. Making a plan helps you see where you need to fill in the gaps in thethinking you have done up to this point.
3) The plan needs to reflect thoughtful decisions. For example, do you want to present all the claims of your argument as equally important, or does a particular one warrant more prominence?If so, would it be more effective to present that one first—or to lead up to it? Perhaps some ideas are closely related to certain other ideas, or one might contradict another: how could your structure reflect that?
Here is the basic structure of your argument that will be represented in your skeleton:
—Your thesis, stated as clearly and concisely as possible.
–First claim (a reason demonstrating the validity of your thesis)
–Evidencein support of that claim
–More evidence
–Additional evidence as needed
–Second claim
–Evidencein support of that claim
–More evidence
–Additional evidence as needed
–Third claimif needed
–Evidencein support of that claim
–More evidence
–Additional evidence as needed
–Additional claim/s as needed
–Evidence as provided for previous claims
–Your conclusion, here stated as briefly as possible.
Think about ways in which the order in which you present items in a list implies the importance or relationships of particular ideas.
4) The plan should not be dense and detailed (just as a house blueprint does not include curtain patterns for an individual room, or specify the color of paint for the windowsills). The plan simply arranges the key elements of a paper into its basic structure. Details come later as you develop your plan into a draft.
In other words, a plan is not a draft. It uses key words, phrases, symbols, etc. rather than long sentences and complete paragraphs. (So please do not submit a preliminary draft instead of a plan for this assignment!)
5) The plan should be brief (one page if possible) and easy to understand at a glance. Here’s a Halloween analogy: your plan is a skeleton, showing the bones of your paper and how they come together—not a fully clothed,plump corpse in a satin-lined coffin!In other words, to be useful, your plan needs to make the relationship of part to whole clearly obvious throughout, just as that Halloween skeleton clearly shows the connection between ankle and foot.
If your plan needs footnotes and explanations, its structure is not yet clear. Tweak it until it comes into sharper focus. In other words, let the bare bones of your paper be visible to the naked eye without an X-ray!
Remember that you are not carving your plan in stone! This plan will be evaluated carefully so that I can help you identify possible design problems and ask simple structural questions.
(For example, does a specific claim in your argument function as a load-bearing wall? If so, how will you support it? )
Make sure your plan is readable, but don’t obsess over neatness or pretty presentation.
It represents work in progress; it’s provisional, a starting point rather than a final project.
Your plan is not a binding legal document! I expect and encourage you to make changes as you develop your plan into an effective final draft as a well-designed, carefully engineered paper.
