Writing and editing advice from www.goodtermpaper.com
Once you have committed to following your prof’s instructions, the best way to fulfill that commitment is through an outline. This does not need to be an elaborate document with Roman Numerals governing your margins; I have scribbled hasty, barely legible outlines on scraps of paper, the back of a business card, even. Sometimes, three or four phrases are all it takes to suggest to your mind what it should be accomplishing.
Remember, this is your blueprint for your own mind to follow- so of course, it must be written in your language! Scribbled phrases, abbreviations, and suggestive arrows, exclamation points and ellipses work for me. This is an ad hoc ‘language’ that I can compose on the fly, take down, and then refer back to and remember- at least for those brief couple of hours in which I will be writing the paper! I might not be able to make sense of it next month, but that doesn’t matter.
Some ideas for outlines for the way in which YOUR mind works:
color coded post it notes. If you had an assignment on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, you might use red for the character of Martin Decoud, blue for the fate of the imaginary republic, grey for notations about the author himself.
note cards, or alternatively, sheaths of butcher paper. note cards allow you to put down distinct ideas on each card, and you can use different colored pens to create the same concept differentiation in the Nostromo example. If you are having trouble organizing your paper, you can just write down all your ideas on cards, randomly, and then sit in front of them and figure out how they all fit together. Obviously, you need some time to really ‘feel’ the cards, hovering and savant like on the floor, but if you’re in a hurry, just tear up a few scraps of paper and hastily move them around until they make sense.
Hey, you’re not making any progress just sitting there, tapping your pencil into the tab key, are you?
The butcher paper is a trick I heard about from writers of long, involved novels. Maybe that’s not your assignment, but 10 or 15 page research papers are not uncommon even at the undergraduate level. For a study of that magnitude, you need to have a clearly delineated relationship between all of your data bits. A large paper needs to be constructed on a wide, convincing base of various kinds of evidence. Some of this evidence should kindle the reader’s emotional side; for a persuasive paper, an introduction that tells a horror story about a troubling problem or an inspirational tale about something positive is very effective. But of course, this should be quickly followed up with hard facts and statistics.
This article was written by the Editor in Chief at www.Goodtermpaper.com.
