sentence outline

Writing the Sentence Outline – Part 1

Write your thesis at the top of the page.

Now turn your thesis into a list of smaller claims. This is the first stage in making an outline that logically supports your thesis (as opposed to a random or incomplete list of ideas that might or might not be logically related). If you find it easier to write your outline using another method, feel free. I'll be assessing the outline on its logical structure, not on how you came up with it.

There are three questions that help here. They're all pretty much the same idea; just pick the one that makes the most sense for your thesis.

· What do you have to prove in order to prove the thesis?

· What are the parts of the thesis?

· What are the reasons the thesis is true?

Whichever question you use, you should end up with a list of smaller claims. That list is the first step of your outline.

Example 1

Thesis: Higher state funding for community colleges will improve the state economy.

What would you have to prove, to prove this thesis? Well, you might need to prove some of the following points:

1. Community colleges contribute to the state economy.

2. Community colleges cannot raise the money they need by themselves.

3. The current level of funding is not enough for the colleges to perform at their maximum potential.

4. Legislators have the power to increase funding.

Now we have a list of claims that, together, make up a kind of proof or equation for the thesis. If we add them all together, we have a pretty convincing case.

Example 2

Thesis: On most measures of college success, students who take English 101 early in their college careers perform better than students who take it later.

What are the parts of this thesis?

1. Students who take 101 early achieve X level on measures of college success

2. Students who take 101 late achieve Y level on measures of college success

3. For most measures, X is greater than Y (comparison between the two)

Here, too, we have a list of claims that add up to the thesis.

NOTICE that in each case, the claims are all different from each other and from the thesis. One of the most common mistakes in student writing is a paper that just keeps saying the same thing over and over again. Every paragraph tries to prove the whole thesis. Ironically, this also makes for a very disorganized paper. If every paragraph makes the same point, there's no reason to put a certain piece of evidence in one rather than another. You end up with facts and ideas thrown in at random. This method avoids that problem because it takes the thesis apart into the smaller pieces it's made of. Each piece is different, and each has a logical relationship to the other pieces and to the thesis overall.

Writing the Sentence Outline – Part 2

Instructions

You will repeat the process from the previous assignment (Part 1), now treating each claim as its own thesis. What do you have to prove in order to prove that claim? What are its parts? What are the reasons it is true? Take your outline, with its list of claims, and break each one down into smaller parts, just the same way you did with the thesis. 

Example 1 Let's look again at our first example from Part 1.

Thesis: Higher state funding for community colleges will improve the state economy.

In the last assignment, we saw how this could break down into three smaller claims:

1. Community colleges contribute to the state economy.

1. Community colleges cannot raise the money they need by themselves.

1. The current level of funding is not enough for the colleges to perform at their maximum potential.

Remember, each of these claims is unique (not repeating any of the others). Each one is logically part of the overall claim (the thesis). All of them together add up to the thesis – in other words, if we can prove all of these, we can be pretty confident about having successfully supported and proven our thesis. It's a lot like a math problem that way. It's not as cut and dried as math, because the issues are more complex and we're dealing with language, which allows for a great deal more ambiguity, but the idea of a proof is still similar.

Now we're going to repeat the process on each of these three claims. Remember we can use any of our three questions: 

1. What do you have to prove, to prove this claim?

1. What are its parts?

1. What are the reasons it is true?

Let's take the first of these three claims: Community colleges contribute to the state economy.

In this case, I'm going to use the third question: what are the reasons this claim is true? In other words, in what ways do community colleges contribute? (You can also think of this as breaking it down into parts, this time focusing on one word economy. What are the different parts of the economy to which community colleges contribute? As I said, these questions are really all getting at the same idea.)

Let's make a list of how community colleges contribute to the economy. These are possibilities:

1. Students become more employable, raising their chances of getting a job.

1. Businesses can hire well-trained workers, improving their competitiveness.

1. Out-of-state businesses are attracted to the high-quality workforce, raising the state's competitiveness and improving its tax base.

These are claims, each of which helps prove the larger claim. They now can be listed as points A, B, C in the outline:

A. Community colleges help students become more employable, raising their chances of getting a job. B. Community colleges help businesses hire well-trained workers, improving their competitiveness. C. Community colleges help attract out-of-state businesses to the high-quality workforce, raising the state's competitiveness and improving its tax base.

If our paper said all of this, it would go a long way toward proving the first claim.

Now turn to the second claim: Community colleges cannot raise the money they need by themselves.

Here again I think our third question is a good strategy: What are the reasons this claim is true? I can think of two promising ideas, both of which work by thinking of what would happen if the colleges did try to raise the money themselves. How might they do this?

1. Raising tuition

1. Getting support from the private sector, such as grants from businesses to help pay for programs

Our idea is that these won't work. So let's turn these into claims. There are different ways to do that. For example, for #1, we might want to talk about the effect of raising tuition on the students, or we might want to talk about the colleges' competitiveness with other schools. I'll go with the first approach. My claim might look something like this:

If the colleges tried to cover all their expenses by raising tuition, they would become too expensive and many people simply would not go.

For the second part, our claim might look something like this:

They can't get everything they need from the private sector because businesses typically only fund programs that directly support their business (e.g., car companies fund automotive programs) and that won't pay for all the other stuff that's needed to run the college.

We've now made serious progress toward proving our second main claim.

As you can see, if you follow this process you will take your thesis from a single idea to a complex, logically organized, effective argument. Having done that, you'll be in a much better position to write the actual paper and support the thesis with evidence, because you'll have a much clearer idea of exactly what facts you need.