Chapter 13 in The
Bedford Researcher discusses how to organize a paper for a writing project.
The chapter reviews common organizational patterns used to format writing
projects; chronology, description, definition, cause/effect, compare/contrast
and process explanation are some of the types of organizational patterns that
Palmquist defines and discusses as options for formatting a paper. Section B of
the chapter reviews how to arrange an argument, including labeling, grouping,
clustering and mapping. Section C reviews outlining techniques and includes a
sample thumbnail outline on page 226 and contrasts the sample sentence topical
outlines provided on page 228.
Creating an outline for a paper is one of the most difficult
aspects of a writing project. You need to take all the information and research
from the sources and group and cluster parts of that information into sections
that make sense. The literature review assignment is a helpful reference for
one’s outline because it already has groups of the information and has themes
that can be used for organizational purposes. I struggle the most with outlines
because I’m constantly arranging and rearranging the sections. It’s hard to
know if a cause and effect approach will be better than a chronological one for
my paper topic. I am working with what seems a lot of themes or categories of
information and it seems choppy to me right now. This chapter was helpful
because it provides a lot of samples for ways to outline a paper.
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