As I mentioned in class, the assignment for next week’s class (a group assignment) is to write up an outline for your paper. Here’s how I would like you to do this:
Write a rough draft of your introduction. The introduction is the most important part of any paper because it contains:
- The motive or justification for the argument (its intellectual context – the considerations that make it interesting, relevant, unobvious, controversial, etc.) and;
- A brief summary of the argument itself (the thesis).
The purpose of having you write a complete rough draft of the introduction is to have you think hard about these components of your paper and take a shot at making them explicit on paper.
Then, write up a bullet point outline of the rest of your paper. Think of each bullet point as a paragraph in the paper. A quick word of advice on this:
In a well-written paper, paragraphs don’t have general topics (e.g. “discuss importance of seaport and Gowanus expressway to Sunset Park”). Instead, they have points to make (e.g. “argue that seaport and Gowanus expressway were vital to Sunset Park’s economic growth and help to explain the neighborhood’s social geography”).
