Outline of Essay 4

For the Outline of Essay 4 assignment, you will take your Research Plan and Questions and turn it into an outline of Essay 4. After doing research to answer the questions and finding answers in the form of statistics, examples, studies, facts, and so forth, put the actual raw data into your outline, and the citations should be pulled out to create a tentative works cited page for Essay 4.

The outline should have, in the order you plan to include it in the paper, all of the information, in condensed form, that you will use as evidence in the paper. You may create a formal outline (using Roman numerals, letters, etc.–see an example of this format on pages 13-14 of Rules for Writers, but keep in mind that your outline should be much more detailed than the example) or an informal outline (see the example on pages 12-13 but also keep in mind yours should be more detailed). Either way, be sure to include the following:

what you are going to use to start the paper with (a startling statistic, background information, a question, an example, etc.), as well as the thesis statement;
what evidence you will include to prove that the problem does indeed exist;
information on the groups affected and the effects of the problem, which you can either organize by a section on each group and the effects related to that group, or by all groups in one section and then various effects in another section or two;
discussion and evidence of the causes of the problem;
a final section on the proposed solution or solutions to the problem.

The above sections should cover what you plan to include in each paragraph of the essay. The more detailed the outline is, the more prepared you will be to draft the paper. Keep in mind that the paper needs to be at least 1250 words, so your outline should have at a minimum six different sections representing the evidence and data that will appear in at least six different paragraphs of the paper.

Be careful not to fall into the trap of including one source per section; remember: you need to integrate and synthesize sources in a research paper and not rely too heavily on any given source in any given section of your paper or for the paper as a whole.

Before you upload the document of your Essay 4 outline to Canvas for a grade, I highly recommend contacting a Writing Center tutor for feedback.

For this exercise, upload a document to Canvas that is a tentative works cited page for Essay 4. Before you upload it, check to make sure that you have

included a title (Works Cited) centered at the top of the page
evenly double spaced all entries, with no extra spacing in between entries
put entries in alphabetical order by last name (or if there is no author’s name by the title)
formatted the entries using reverse (or hanging) indentation: instead of indenting the first line, you indent the second and all subsequent lines by one tab
put URLS in the proper format: no underlining or live links; remove the http:// at the beginning of the URL
you may also want to check with a Writing Center tutor if there are any other problems with the citations before uploading the file for a grade

Tip: it is best to use Microsoft Word, not Google Docs, for this assignment, as Google Docs files tend to mess up the proper format when uploaded. You have access to Microsoft Word via the Office 365 tab in the left-hand column of Canvas.