Hi. My name is Katie, and today we'll discuss using your pre-writing during drafting. In today's lesson, we'll begin by discussing some ways to approach pre-writing, like using your annotated bibliographies and a detailed outline. Next, we'll take a close look at how to use these tools to help you form your research essay.
Let's begin by talking about outlines. I highly recommend that you create a solid outline for your essay that includes a plan for incorporating your research and that you refer to this outline during the process of drafting your paper. This will help you combat writer's block, maintain focus, avoid unintentional plagiarism by forgetting to cite others' ideas and quotes, and, overall, I think that you'll find that it really speeds up the drafting process altogether.
Your detailed outline should include not only your primary claims, but also source information that you intend to use to back up these claims. When you're thinking about the source information, it's a real time-saver to make a note of exactly when you intend to incorporate it in your argument and why you want to use those research sources.
It's important to remember that an outline is not a set of rules. It's just a guideline. So don't be scared to include information that you're not positive about, because outlines are flexible. It's incredibly common that new ideas and points will develop as your thinking progresses or that you'll need to incorporate unplanned research, either in the form of including new research that needs to be done or realizing that a source you've already worked with is useful in a place that you didn't previously plan for.
The second pre-writing strategy that we'll discuss today is called an annotated bibliography. I highly recommend that you take careful notes and annotate your sources as you perform your research. This is a really useful way for remembering the main points of the sources that you've evaluated. And if you include a mention of the possible value of this source in your overall arguments, it saves a lot of time.
You should look back at your annotated bibliographies and other research notes when you want to be sure that you're using a source correctly or if you're considering incorporating a source into an unplanned section of the essay in order to make sure that it's accurate. Even though these are great time-savers, I still advise you to allow for plenty of time for this development in order to create the best possible draft of your essay.
I've created this sample outline to help us model how to use outlines and annotated bibliographies to organize thinking for drafting an essay. As you can see, I've included a sample working thesis, and I've crafted some topic sentences, which are claims that support it. Before I actually begin drafting any of these paragraphs, I want to think about how my essay is working as a whole. This means that I need to consider things like looking at my rhetorical approach, considering the sources that I'm going to use, and overall analyzing the cohesiveness of my argument.
One of the things that really jumps out at me about this argument is that it feels a little disorganized. I want my supporting claims to really flow into each other in order to build a concept for my readers. For example, if my thesis is about education, I probably want to start with the big picture. Why is education-- why are we even looking at education? In addition, I would say, actually, that this point should have come next to my argument.
Now you can see the way that these ideas will flow into each other. This is why we're talking about education. This is what's not working in education. These are the consequences of the fact that this is not working.
Next, I'm going to take a look at my source information. And having detailed knowledge of my sources is really important for evaluating the way that I'm incorporating them into my essay. One of the ways we can do this is just by looking at the number of sources that I'm using. I have two authors here, one author here, and two authors here. So, immediately, that highlights the fact that I should probably find another author to support this claim in order to have a nice balanced argument.
Another thing that really jumps out to me is something that I might not notice unless I had really good, solid knowledge of my sources or I looked back at my notes to remind myself of what types of articles I'm citing. This is important to this argument because these two authors are highly theoretical. This author uses both theory and research to support her argument. And this argument is balanced with one theoretical author and one research-based testimony.
So if, again, I'm thinking about the way that I balance my sources, I'm probably going to want to find something for this section that incorporates research statistics. In this way, I've used an analysis of my outline to identify holes in my argument before I even get into the process of creating my paragraphs, rather than retrospectively as I edit and revise my essay.
The next step is finding this information that I've identified as necessary. One way that I can do this is by looking back at my article annotations to see if I've already found the information that I needed. Here are my notes on an article that I haven't yet included in this outline. And as you can see, down here at the bottom, I've included an annotation with key points and even some important quoted information that I think will be relevant to my thesis.
One of the terms that jumps out at me right away is protectionist approach. Remember, I'm talking about protection and preparation in my outline. So I see immediately where this could fit in. You can see that I've made a note that this author includes statistics to support her claims. This is exactly what I need for this paragraph, because Postman and Buckingham take a very theoretical approach. I can use Linn's statistics to balance this out for my essay.
So, hopefully, now you can see how I turn this general outline into a more detailed outline in order to facilitate my writing process. Another way to use this outline to facilitate the process of drafting my essay is to go back to my working thesis and add elements which will clarify and tighten up my argument. For example, my working thesis right now is that critical media literacy education should be included into all areas of the public school curriculum. But if I look here, I notice that all of my sources pertain to American education in particular. So I can refine my thesis by specifying it according to the supporting evidence that I've selected.
I can further facilitate the drafting of my essay by including some sample language, which I might want to include within my paragraphs, and providing some ideas for what should go in my conclusion. As I turn these bullet points into complete sentences, I always want to remember to refer back to my annotated bibliographies to see if I can steal some sentences that I've already written. In this way, my outline begins to become the draft of my essay, and all that I'll really need to do once I've put these main points into sentences is to add sentences which create transitions and clarify connections.
In today's lesson, we discussed how to use pre-writing strategies like creating a detailed outline and using annotated bibliographies to conduct the drafting process of your essay. Then, we took a look at some models and talked about how to use an outline and annotated bibliographies to create a solid plan for the draft of your essay. I advise that you practice this often and find the method that works best for you. I hope that this tutorial was helpful. Thank you very much for joining me today.
