You may be tempted to save time by skipping the outline, but this will backfire. Unless you are intimately familiar with the topic, you need to take some time to organize your thoughts in a logical order. If you don’t do this, you will be improvising as you go along, which means you will have to revise parts of the paper as you progress. On the other hand, if you create an outline, you will have a clear plan to follow and you will not need to restructure your paper in any significant way. Instead of second-guessing yourself and constantly correcting yourself, you proceed with confidence.
This may be easier said than done, as the process of creating the outline can be more difficult than actually writing the paper. All of the heavy liftings consists of creating a conceptual framework underpinning the key themes of your paper. Once that is out of the way, everything else will fall into place. In other words, when you have a brief account of everything you’d like to write, it will be easy for you to come up with the words needed to meet the minimal length requirements.
This leaves the question of how you can produce such a substantial outline. If you follow this plan, your ability to generate an outline will improve significantly.
A. Carefully study your instructions and the rubric.
B. Determine which questions the professor wants you to answer. If there isn’t a specific question, pay attention to the particular themes that are needed.
C. Classify your paper: once you do that, you will be able to determine which approach is the best:
● Is it a research paper where you are summarizing a topic? If so, what is the topic?
● Can you narrow it down?
● Can you clarify or simplify it?
● Is it an argumentative paper, critiquing a point of view?
If so, articulate that point of view as honestly as possible. Do not commit a strawman fallacy. Meaning, do not oversimplify the views of the person whom you’re critiquing. Once you understand what they are claiming, there are two different ways in which you can challenge them.
You can spot a factual error in their claim or identify a logical fallacy. In other words, ask yourself:
● Is their argument based on a false assumption?
● Are they making unwarranted assumptions?
● If their premises are sound, are they making an error in reasoning?
If they have committed a logical fallacy, their conclusion is going to be false, even if their assumptions are good.
