Today’s Plan:
- Extra Credit Final Surveys
- Reviewing the Calendar
- From Research to Outlining
- Homework
Reviewing the Calendar
Here is the post-break calendar. We are still on track. Our focus this week will be on outlining your research paper. Remember that there is no class next week–in place of class I will be meeting with you one-on-one to discuss your paper draft. Ergo, you need to have a draft of the paper done by the time we meet next week.
From Research to Outlining
I think one of the hardest parts of writing a paper is knowing where to begin. What you should write first. It helps me to know where I want to end up–to have a kind of blueprint of the paper. That’s how I think of outlining, and I approach it in two ways: from a bird’s eye view and a kind of walking tour of a construction site.
From a bird’s eye view, I want to know the genre of paper I am constructing. What are the major sections? A research paper is often a narrative, a kind of play. For instance:
- Act One: there is a problem
- Act Two: other people who have tried to solve the problem
- Act Three: a brand new approach to solving the problem
Or:
- Act One: there is a problem
- Act Two: the is a mystery about what is causing the problem
- Act Three: One potential cause (and some folks who think this cause is wrong)
- Act Four: A second potential cause (and some folks who think this cause is wrong)
- Act Five: A third potential cause (and why I think this cause is right)
Or:
- Act One: scientists agree that there is a problem
- Act Two: but the public doesn’t seem to know about this problem
- Act Three: here’s where scientists have tried and failed to communicate the problem
- Act Four: wherein I, the writer, attempt to communicate the problem to some people and solicit their reactions
- Act Five: wherein I, the writer, make recommendations, based on Act four, for how we might better communicate the problem
Or:
- Act One: there is a problem
- Act Two: scientists have offered various suggestions for how to fix the problem
- Act Three: I, the writer, interview people and see if they know about / what they think about / why they (dis)like the potential solution
- Act Four: based on my research, I, the writer, suggest which of the suggestions reviewed in Act two are most likely to work
Or:
Ok, let me be clear about this: the list of outlines above is not exhaustive. You might end up writing a paper that looks different. But I hope this list helps you reflect, as you are researching, on how the material you are working with could be arranged. Invention and arrangement go hand in hand.
The material above was written for my ENG 123 class, in which we focus on scientific problems and research. But it shouldn’t be too hard to adapt these suggestions for a game. To return to my “how do I begin” question: you begin to write a 15 page paper by thinking about it as a series of 3 or 4 page papers–each of which has its own clear purpose. How can you “chunk” your project?
As I get more involved in my project, I’ll start to think in smaller chunks. I’m looking to generate a floor plan–an attempt to walk myself through my argument(s) step-by-step. This is called a sentence outline. Here’s where I try to order all of the topic sentences for my paper. This gives me the steps in the argument. Then it is a matter of going back to fill in the evidence I need for each claim.
Here’s a sample sentence outline for an article I co-wrote. Notice how it is written in complete sentences. After each sentence there’s some description of what that paragraph needs to do.
My paper has the following section headings:
- Introduction
- This section lays out our problem: that many writing courses eschew “creativity” because they either think teaching creativity is impossible or simply too difficult. We acknowledge that teaching creativity is painful, but necessary
- Section 1: Postpedagogy, Creativity, and/as Disequilibrium
- These sections provide more theoretical background–what is postpedagogy? in what ways is it a creative practice? in what ways does it “hurt” (via disequilibrium, confusion, stress) students? why is disequilibrium essential to learning?
- Section 2: Ambiguous Constraints: Moving Towards a Postpedagogical Creative Practice
- This section is almost like a pre-methodology section, since it describes where we did our experiment and gives an overview of our experiment
- Section 3: Methods
- Notice that it takes us 3 paragraphs to explain that we did a survey. And, truth be told, we could have done a better job, since we do not address the rationale behind the survey questions
- Section 4: Findings
- Here’s where we synthesize what we learned from our student surveys
- Section 5: Discussion / Toward a Productive Anxiety
- In this section we discuss how we integrate what we learned in the surveys into our ideas on creativity etc
- Section 6: Creativity, Disequilibrium, and Assessment
- During our review process, we were instructed to address how we grade creative projects. It was a useful request! But this section didn’t appear in our first, second, or third draft. It came later
- Conclusion
Note, too, that it is 8 pages and 1800 words. The final version of the paper is 32 pages and 9000 words. Your sentence outline should probably be about 1/4 to 1/5 of your final paper. Let’s review my stipulations for the paper:
Your final paper should be 1800-2500 words (roughly 7-10 pages double-spaced). The final paper must contain at least 8 sources. 5 of these sources need to be academic, peer-reviewed journal articles. The final paper must be written in a format suitable to your major.
Following my recommendations, your sentence outline should be around 600 words and around 2 and 1/2 pages double-spaced (but I imagine it might be even longer than this. I’ve set up a template to get you started.
I am not expecting your paper will have the exact same layout as mine. But I do expect that your paper can be divided into sections that roughly follow the typical expectations for a research paper:
- Intro
- Section 1: Background lit
- Section 2: Methods
- Section 3: Findings
- Section 4: Discussion
- Conclusion
Or a scholarly analysis paper:
- Intro
- Analytical Approach / Theoretical Lens
- Analysis Point 1
- Analysis Point 2
- Analysis Point 3
- Analysis Point 4
- Conclusion
Homework
On Wednesday we will import the rest of your research annotations onto the Blogger site we began last week. The idea is to turn that into a resource as you draft your papers. Friday we be a work in class day (I tried to sign out the computer lab, but it was already reserved). I’ll be moving around to check on sentence outlines.
There’s two things:
- Make sure you have completed your research annotations. Same deal as last time: 2 for a C, 3 for a B, 4 for an A.
- Begin working on your sentence outline. These will be due in Canvas next Monday.
