WRITING NATURE:
DISCOURSES OF ECOLOGY
There will be two phases in building your reasearch paper outline.
A rough working outline beginning with your motivating question and conclusing with a tentative thesis statement. This outline should reflect your initial thoughts on coverage and organizational strategy. It should indicate the main and secondary points of your paper, down to two levels of detail:
I.
A.
A detailed formal outline beginning with your motivating question and concluding with a more focused, although possibly still somewhat tentative, thesis statement. This outline should indicate not only your organizational strategy, but also how and where you intend to use source material. Be aware of and remain open to the possibility (even the probability?), that your thesis as well as your organization and use of sources will continue to evolve as you write. (Afterall, writing is thinking, folks!) To be really useful, an outline like this, which attempts to relate and integrate some pretty complex material, should probably include at least three, and possibly four, levels of detail:
I.
A.
1.
a.
b.
2.
a.
B.
1.
a.
b.
c.
2.
a.
b.
II.
...and so on
PHASE 1: Thursday, February 27, in class
PHASE 2: Tuesday, March 4, in class
€ Research paper complete draft is due in class on Thursday, March 6. You will probably want to be working be working on your draft during the weekend before the formal outline is due (on March 4).
€ Conferences will be scheduled to discuss these drafts on Friday, March 7 and Saturday, March 8. (Completed peer review forms are due at conference.)
€ Revision is due with complete portfolio on Monday, March 17, by 3 p.m. at my office.
In pacing yourself, please keep in mind, too, the following due dates coming up:
€ Tuesday March 11 and Thursday, March 13: multimedia oral presentations related to your research paper or your Community Writing Project
€ Due Monday, March 17, by 3 p.m. at my office: complete writing portfolio for the quarter (including portfolio and section introductions)
THE GENERAL IDEA/THE SPECIFIC POINT:
The period of time and activity between the working bibliography and the formal outline is intense (to say the least) involving a great deal of the get-down-to-business sort of work that the research project calls for.
€ It involves an in-depth reading and evaluation of secondary sources (and primary ones, if you are using them).
€ If you are conducting interviews, you follow through on them now.
€ As you explore your sources in depth, you transcribe and take detailed notes, recording relevant quotations, paraphrasing other writers' ideas, and coming up with and setting down in your notes pivotal ideas of your own.
€ You make certain as you go that you have taken down completely and correctly all the particular information you will need for in-text citations (oarenthetical citations or footnotes) and for your works cited (aka your bibliography), including page references, specific and inclusive. As you read and evaluate your sources, developing a deeper, more specific and sophisticated understanding of your subject, your thesis begins to come into focus, and your statement of it reflects the evolution in your thinking. These are giant steps toward your finished product; they represent a lot of work.
If you do a good, thorough job at this stage, you may find that the actual writing of your research paper is, if not exactly "easy," at least more leisurely.