Chapter Thirteen

Chapter 13 is about organizing our final paper. The first section deals with choosing a pattern. Examples of patterns include chronology, descriptions, cause/effect, process explanation, problem/solution, and more. Depending on our purpose, our role as a writer, and how our argument is best formatted influences our choice in patterns. The second section gives us strategies for arranging our argument. The first is labeling sources so you can quickly figure out where you will use them (Introduction, Part I, etc). The second strategy is to group our sources by the labels into files, folders, etc. A third strategy is clustering: arranging sources around your thesis statement and drawing relations between topics. The fourth strategy, mapping, is similar: it involves arranging sources into a timeline or visually seeing how one argument builds to another. The final section in chapter 13 is about forming an outline for our papers. There are informal and formal outlines, which include topical and sentence outlines.

We are working on writing our outlines, rationale, and abstract in class this week, so chapter 13 is very appropriate. Choosing a pattern is important, and being conscious of your pattern with help maintain consistency throughout your paper. We have already spent some time arranging our sources, as we grouped them together in our literature reviews last week. I thought the mapping strategy was interesting, though I don't think it will be particularly helpful for my paper. I appreciated the explanation of different outlines and their purposes. I had to write a sentence outline for my biology class and it's much easier to see exactly where the paper is going. Overall, I think chapter 13 teaches us that whatever patterns, strategies, and outlines we use, it's important to think about what will make it easy for the reader to follow our argument.