Initial Research: Project 1

One of the most important parts of researching any topic is deciding what exactly you'll research.  For this, you'll want to start with an open-ended approach, and then use your initial research to narrow-down your topic and your genre.

Outline Fundamentals

One of the most important parts of writing involves planning.  After you've begun your reading and taken notes on your sources, you need to come up with a "plan of action" for how to start your writing.

For my purposes, there are only three basic things I look for in your outlines:

1. The broad topics and secondary topics are easy to see.
2. Each broad topic either has secondary topics or a connection statement.
3. You've noted which quote cards are related to each of your broad topics.

Just note that every writer follows different outlining practices - I myself use different types of outlines depending on the type of writing I'm doing.  So for this course, I don't require any specific style of outline - instead, I present three different outline approaches that I tend to use, and you can pick any of these choices.  Or you can use a different approach entirely - that's perfectly all right.  I encourage you to follow an approach that's comfortable for you.

Read More Outline Fundamentals

Go to Outline Approaches