Student's guide to writing college papers, Fourth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2010
Unhelpful plans to avoid
Planning a first draft
Writing your paper
7.1 Unhelpful Plans to Avoid
7.2 Create a Plan That Meets Your Readers' Needs
7.2.1 Converting a Storyboard into an Outline
7.2.2 Sketch a Working Introduction
7.2.3 Identify Key Terms That Unite Your Paper
7.2.4 Find the Key Terms Distinctive to Each Section
7.2.5 Order Your Sections by Ordering Your Reasons
7.2.6 Sketch a Brief Introduction to Each Section and Subsection
7.2.7 Sketch in Evidence and Acknowledgments
Once you assemble your argument, you might be ready to write your draft. But experienced writers know that the time they invest in planning a draft more than pays off when they write it. Some plans, however, are better than others.
WORKING IN GROUPS
Organize a Writing Group
If you haven't done it yet, now is the time to organize a writing group of three to five classmates (no more). If you already have a group, now is the time to get to work seriously. Plan to meet once or, if your deadline is near, twice a week. Have an agenda that reflects your stage in the process of research and writing. Start every meeting with elevator stories (see 3.2.3). If your storyboard Is starting to fill up, bring it to the meeting. Although your colleagues' suggestions are always welcome, your goal early on is to have someone willing to listen and respond to your ideas. The sooner you get those ideas out of your mind and into the light of day, the better you will know how well you really understand them.
7.1 Unhelpful plans to avoid
Do not organize your report in any of these three ways:
1. Do not organize it as a story of your research, especially not as a mystery, with your claim revealed at the end. Readers care about what you found, not every step it took you to get there. You see signs of that in language like The first issue was . . . Then I compared . . . Finally I conclude . . .
2. Do not patch together quotations, summaries of sources, or downloads from the web. Teachers want to see your thinking, not that of others. They really dislike reports that read like a collage of web screens. Do that, and you'll seem not only an amateur but, worse, a plagiarist (see 10.3).
3. Do not mechanically organize your paper around the terms of your assignment or the most obvious elements of your topic.
✵ If your assignment lists issues to cover, don't think you must address them in the order given.
✵ If you decide to compare and contrast Freud's and Jung's analyses of the imagination, avoid organizing your report in the two most obvious parts, the first on Freud, the second on Jung. Break those two big topics into their parts, then organize your report around them.