A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, 7th edition - Kate L. Turabian 2007

Avoid unhelpful plans
Planning a first draft
Part I. Research and writing: from planning to production

Once you assemble your argument, you might be ready to draft it. But experienced writers know that the time they invest in planning a draft more than pays off when they write it. To draft effectively, though, you need more than just the elements of a sound argument; you need a plan to assemble them into a coherent one. Some plans, however, are better than others.

6.1 Avoid unhelpful plans

Avoid certain approaches.

1. Do not organize your report as a narrative of your project, especially not as a mystery story, with your claim revealed at the end. Few readers care what you found first, then problems you overcame, then leads you pursued, on and on to the end. You see signs of that in language like The first issue was . . ., Then I compared. . . . Finally I conclude.

2. Do not patch together a series of quotations, summaries of sources, or downloads from the Web. Teachers want to see your thinking, not that of others. They especially dislike reports that read like a collage of Web screens. Do that, and you'll seem not only an amateur but worse, possibly a plagiarist (see 7.9).

3. Do not mechanically organize your report around the terms of your assignment or topic. If your assignment lists issues to cover, don't think you must address them in the order given. If you were asked or you decide to compare and contrast Freud's and Jung's analyses of the imagination, you would not have to organize your report in two parts, the first on Freud, the second on Jung. It would be more productive to break those two big topics into their parts, then organize your report around them (for more on this, see 6.2.5—6.2.6).