Avoid unhelpful plans - Planning a first draft - Research and writing

A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, Ninth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2018

Avoid unhelpful plans
Planning a first draft
Research and writing

6.1 Avoid Unhelpful Plans

6.2 Create a Plan That Meets Your Readers’ Needs

6.2.1 Convert Your Storyboard into an Outline

6.2.2 Sketch a Working Introduction

6.2.3 Identify Key Concepts That Will Run through Your Paper

6.2.4 Use Key Terms to Create Subheads That Uniquely Identify Each Section

6.2.5 Order Your Paper

6.2.6 Make Your Order Clear with Transitional Words

6.2.7 Sketch a Brief Introduction to Each Section and Subsection

6.2.8 For Each Section, Sketch Evidence, Acknowledgments, Warrants, and Summaries

6.2.9 Sketch a Working Conclusion

6.3 File Away Leftovers

Once you have assembled 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, you need more than just the elements of a sound argument; you need a plan to assemble those elements into a coherent draft. Some plans, however, are better than others.

6.1 Avoid Unhelpful Plans

When you are doing research, it is good to write early, but your early writing should not determine the plan for your final paper: the real purpose of that early writing is to help you discover your ideas, not to communicate them to your readers. If you find yourself adopting one of the following plans, pause. It means that you are not yet ready to draft your paper.

1. 1. Narrative of discovery. If you find yourself telling the story of your project—First I investigated . . . Then I compared . . .—you are probably still too close to the activity of research to put your readers’ needs before your own. Most readers want to know your ideas, not necessarily the steps through which you arrived at them.

2. 2. Patchwork of sources. If your draft is just a series of quotations, paraphrases, and summaries of sources, you are probably overwhelmed by your sources and have not yet developed a controlling claim of your own. Readers want to know that you’ve done your research thoroughly, but they also want to know what you think. Note: if you submit a paper that is stitched together from other sources, especially if you have cut-and-pasted from the web, you also risk being seen not just as an amateur but also as a plagiarist (see 7.9).

3. 3. Mirror of the assignment. If you are writing for a course and your draft simply mirrors the organization of your assignment, you have to ask why. Are you just playing it safe or going through the motions? You owe it to yourself and your teacher to do more. Are you still developing your own ideas? Let the structure of your paper reflect them. Are you struggling to organize your paper another way? (See section 6.2.5 for some possibilities.)