Final Project Outline (5% of final grade)

Due

  • Friday, April 18

Requirements

  • As long as it needs to be.
  • MLA or Chicago citation style.
  • Turn in via Canvas; doc, docx, or pdf.
  • If you use AI writing or research tools for any part of the writing process, a statement about how you used these tools and why. See the “Course Info & Policies” page under “Academic Integrity and AI Writing Tools” for more information about what this statement should look like.

Please see the final research paper assignment page for a description of its requirements.

You should do or include the following things in your outline:

  1. The latest articulation of your central research question.
  2. You should format it as an outline. You don’t need to write complete sentences (though you can if it’s helpful, or if some appear to you).
  3. You should organize your outline into sections, with section headings. These headings should be minimally descriptive, e.g., “Section 1: Introduction,” “Section 2: Discussion of Existing Research on Topic X,” “Section 3: Close Reading of Text Y”, etc. These sections should correspond to what you imagine, right now, as the structure of your final research paper. Think of each section of your outline as a concept or a movement in your argument.
  4. Within each section, you should include the points you want to make. You don’t need to use complete sentences, but you should make an effort to indicate what point(s) you need to discuss or to prove in this section and how you will go about discussing or proving them. You should indicate where you will cite specific parts of your primary text(s); this might mean including specific quotes or it might mean including paraphrases or summaries, but it should include specific page numbers (if appropriate).
  5. You should indicate where you will cite secondary sources when appropriate and what specifically you will cite. This might mean including specific quotes from these sources, or it might mean paraphrases, but it should include specific page numbers.
  6. A bibliography or Works Cited page where you include citations of the sources you cite in your outline.

Why Write an Outline?

The point of this assignment is to ask you to articulate your ideas and arguments for your final paper in a structured way. The more detailed your outline is – the more specific quotes you include, the more sources you cite, the more time you take in thinking through your paper’s structure – the more helpful it will be to you when you sit down to write your final research paper. I will also be able to give you more detailed feedback on your ideas if you submit a more detailed outline.

I find it helpful to think of outlines as very loose first drafts of my papers. I like using outlines because they force me to order my thoughts, to work out how I will support my argument using specific pieces of evidence, and to figure out how I’m going to cite the research I’ve done. I can complete them more quickly than I can a written first draft because I don’t have to worry about phrasing or transitions, i.e., about writing in complete sentences or making sure that my sentences connect to one another. I can just focus on my ideas, on the evidence I will use to support these ideas, and on making sure to cite the work I’m building on that has come before mine. I find that outlines take some of the pressure off of “writing” and allow a structured space for idea generation.

I also tend to include more information, ideas, and evidence in my outlines than I will be able to include in my paper. When I go to write my paper, this helps me to choose the most powerful or crucial examples or pieces of evidence to include in the paper itself.

Focus on Structure

One of the main advantages of writing an outline is that it helps you to visualize the structure of your paper before you write it. As you compose your outline, ask these questions of your paper:

  1. Why does each section need to appear in the order in which it appears?;
  2. What would happen if you changed the order of one or more of your sections? How would this change your argument?