This video describes how to write an outline for three types of papers: a persuasive essay, a literature review, and a research design. The key points to remember are to use the outline to structure your argument and to keep it short!
So when I am talking about an outline in general, I am talking about a document that looks like this: you use numbered lists and bullet points to indicate the importance of different parts of your argument and their relationship to each other. There is a hierarchy to an outline. The first level of numbers indicates paragraphs, lower levels indicate sub-points or evidence.
This is one of the few assignments where the format you use really matters – do not just write a few sentences and turn it in as a paragraph. Thinking about the structure of your argument is the point.
Persuasive Essay
You are probably most accustomed to writing persuasive essays, essays that you use to support a thesis statement. For this type of outline, you need to think through what your thesis statement will be, then what are the main arguments that support that thesis. Your thesis will go in the introduction of your essay, and then you should have a paragraph for each of those sub-arguments.
That is how you should organize your outline – the thesis at the top, with each sub argument given a number to form the top tier of your outline. For outlines I assign for this class, I will always ask you to draft the first paragraph of your essay or report. So your introductory paragraph basically states your thesis. Then the points in your outline are the main arguments that support your thesis. These sentences, if properly done, can become the topic sentences of the paragraphs in the body of your essay.
For example, let’s say your thesis statement is that political institutions determine a country’s economic growth. There are many ways you could make this argument; I will choose two here: that institutions shape the incentives for individual behavior and that corruption thrives when the judicial system does not prosecute it. These two arguments develop the idea summarized in the thesis, so they are your main points in the outline. You need to provide evidence to support your argument, though, so that is what you list as sub-points in the outline. You can mention articles you read in class that support the point, but what is best to do is to identify the specific facts within those articles that support your point. For example, you could cite Why Nations Fail to support your general point that market economies require rule of law to guarantee competition, but it would be even better to cite the comparison of Bill Gates and Carlos Slim for how they built wealth or the comparison of North and South Korea on how institutions promote prosperity. Don’t describe the argument in detail, just write a sentence about each piece of evidence.
So to summarize, the key things to include in an outline for a persuasive essay are your central points and the specific facts that support them.
Literature Review
A literature review is not designed to persuade the reader that your thesis is correct, but rather to establish that the topic you have chosen to research – and the hypothesis you have chosen to test it – are valid and interesting.
In this case, your introductory paragraph should describe your research question and provide context for it. For example, if your research question is on the relationship between gun control legislation and school shootings, one thing you can do in your introduction is establish what the correlation between these two issues is – whether states that have more gun control legislation have fewer school shootings.
After the introduction, the primary way you organize a literature review is by theory. For example, if you have chosen to research why people vote for a particular candidate for U.S. president, your literature review needs to summarize existing theories for how people decide to vote (for example, based on party affiliation, candidates’ past records, or candidates’ biographies). Determining what these categories are is one of your main tasks as you prepare a literature review.
Unlike an outline for a persuasive essay, it is fine to summarize articles in your outline of a literature review. What’s important is to keep your summaries short. In the outline, you are just categorizing existing research, not explaining it, so try to get your summaries down to one phrase or sentence. Bear in mind also that you may want to use an article in more than one category of research. In that case, make sure you highlight the relevant part of the research in each section.
Research Design
Finally, an outline of a research design should help clarify the choices you are making in the design. By the time you are outlining a design, you will have already written your literature review, so don’t repeat your work. Focus on the choices you are making about cases, variables, and the method you will choose. The specifics will vary depending on the type of research you are proposing: if you are proposing a comparison of two countries, you will need to outline why those two countries are the best ones to study. If you are proposing a field experiment, you need to explain how you would achieve randomization.
Two things every research design outline will have in common, though, are discussions of variables and validity.
If you are proposing to conduct statistical research, your discussion of variables is pretty straightforward: you need to state which variables from which datasets will measure your independent, dependent, and control variables. But even if you are doing other types of research, you need to describe what your variables are and how you incorporate them into your design. For example, for a controlled comparison of two cases, you need to explain what variables those two cases are similar on (your controls). For survey research, you need to craft questions that accurately measure your cause and effect. So no matter what, you need a section where you briefly define your variables and state how you will observe them.
Just as important, your research design will need to discuss the internal and external validity of your research plan. No design is perfect and yours doesn’t need to be. But you must be able to recognize and acknowledge the shortcomings of your study. So you should include a few notes on what these are. For example, do you fully describe a causal mechanism? Are there alternate explanations you miss? If you are taking a sample, what are the consequences of doing so?
This outline will help you structure your paper, but the primary purpose of a design outline is to catch problems early in the process. By writing down your initial ideas for your design in a concise way, you can identify problems (or have me identify) problems before you spend too much time writing the actual paper.
Conclusion
So to wrap up, an outline must have a numbered, hierarchical structure and must be concise – use complete sentences, but don’t write paragraphs. It is a tool to help you structure your arguments and identify problems in a paper before you spend too much time writing, and one I encourage you to use in all your work.