Organizing Evidence

Once you have collected your evidence, how do you organize it?

Outlines offer a great framework for getting started and progressing towards a draft. They become the roadmap to your paper. Outlines come in a variety of structures and more than likely your instructor will request a specific outline format. Nevertheless, outlines offer you a great start to structuring and organizing your ideas onto paper. Depending upon how you organize your evidence will drive which type of outline you use.

Outlining

Chances are, most of your research papers for English, History, and the Humanities will follow a traditional essay format. This outline is based on a thesis-based essay. It looks like this:

Beginning an outline with a topic helps to frame your ideas and evidence. From there you can provide main ideas, supporting details, develop your thesis, and begin to see your ideas take shape.

Imagine that you’ve been tasked with writing a paper about the aftermath of “No Child Left Behind Legislation” (A 2002 statute in the United States mandated standards-based education and required schools to give assessments and reach certain milestones in order to receive federal funding). You begin with the following working thesis statement:

• “The high stakes testing that is part of No Child Left Behind has a negative impact on student writing and writing instruction, as the act leaves little room for writing instruction in a school’s curriculum.”

For each topic sentence, we want to include evidence and details that support the claim. For example, let’s consider claims for the following topic sentence: “Because of No Child Left Behind, the time that has been taken from thoughtful writing instruction has led to problems in student writing—an important skill for college and the workforce.”

Building an outline is a great way to review your argument and notice where evidence can be placed to help support your claim. For instance, in an essay about global warming, you can find evidence that show how air quality effects health or evidence about temperatures affecting crop growth. You can look in science or agricultural journals to find evidence to support your claim Think about the most important thoughts you want your reader to take away from your paper. This outline example puts into action a topic, a thesis, main ideas/supporting ideas, evidence, and a conclusion and prepares you for the next phase of drafting a paper.

Outline Example

1. Introduction
   1. Impacts of global warming
   2. background, context for topic
   3. Global warming has negative impacts on agriculture, weather, and air quality which impact our earth and our health.
2. Global warming impacts agriculture
   1. Crop growth
   2. How crops are affected by changing temperatures from global warming
3. Weather
   1. Warmer temperatures
   2. Colder temperatures
      1. Evidence – Climate changes affects various geographic locations differently (National Geographic Journal)
      2. Evidence – Changing weather temperatures affect crops differently
4. Air quality
   1. Temperatures affect air quality
   2. Affects human health
      1. Supporting details – Ground level ozone can increase and more emissions of pollutants can be released into the air.
      2. Evidence – (The United States Environmental Protection Agency, epa.gov)
5. Conclusion
   1. review central ideas presented in body and make connection to thesis
   2. transition to closing thoughts
   3. closing thoughts