ESSAY

Social Justice and Family Policy Dr. Williams

Instructions for the Concept Outline

The purpose of the concept outline is to provide a tentative draft concept of what your essay will look

like. It’s highly recommended that before writing the concept outline, one reads through the

instructional for the essay first, as the concept essentially prebuilds off the essay. For instance, the

essay requires that students identify a policy and two corresponding issues (among other things). For

the concept outline, you’re only notating what your chosen policy is and what your two corresponding

issues are. There is an expectation of some citation (of scholarly/peer-reviewed sources) at this point as

well, as students should have pulled some research by now about their chosen policy and arguments,

but for this assignment close attention should be paid to those sources that would help to substantiate

any arguments around one’s corresponding issues. Your submitted document can be any number of

pages but it should be comprehensive and lengthy enough to show that a good amount of thought and

preparation has thus far gone into the construction of your essay (remember, students have had the

entire semester to get to this point, so much is expected now). This document can be written in a semi-

informal fashion, but citations must still be done appropriately. This instructional is foremost designed

to provide clarity on how to structure the outline:

1. The structure of the paper should be broken down by sections:

a. The first section should respond to the chosen policy. Here students should

articulate what their chosen policy is and why. There is no need at this very

moment to cite here, but if you have sources and choose to cite you should do

so appropriately and include these citations in a reference sheet at the end of

the document with other references that will follow in the next sections.

b. The second section should speak to the first corresponding issue, and here,

there is some expectation of citation although it doesn’t have to be to the level

that you would normally see in a full essay. You’d want to ensure that you

comprehensively and cogently explain some arguments here.

c. The third section should speak to the second corresponding issue, and here,

there is some expectation of citation although it doesn’t have to be to the level

that you would normally see in a full essay. You’d want to ensure that you

comprehensively and cogently explain some arguments here.

d. You should close the document with a reference list that should be completed

in APA style. Students are expected to have proper APA—and there is a link on

the syllabus to a resource on APA.

Note: At this stage, what you submit for the concept is just a draft (you can totally change around what

you submit here). This allows the instructor to see where you are in the writing/research process and to

provide you with some feedback before the essay is fully completed. But grading of this assignment will

be based on the comprehensiveness, APA, and normal writing competencies. There is no page

minimum or maximum—just ensure that you’ve fully articulated what was asked of you to do, if you fail

to do so, points will be deducted.