Week 3A - Create a Writing Plan

Activity 1 | Activity 2 | Activity 3 | Activity 4 | Activity 5 | Activity 6

Activity 1: Introduction

Now that you have synthesized all of your research, how do you make a working document out of it? When you begin to write a research paper, you need to organize your thoughts in some way. You may like to use an outline or a clustering tool to show the flow of your major topics and elaborated details for each. This is the task you will be doing for this week. You will provide an organization tool for your research paper that clearly presents an introduction with your thesis statement, a clearly focused body, and a conclusion.

Develop a Thesis Statement for Your Outline

By now you should have collected data from numerous sources in an attempt to answer your research question. You have also had time to reflect on the meaning, value, and implications of your data. You should now be ready to turn your research question into a thesis statement. A thesis combines the writer’s initial research question with a hunch about the direction the data is moving.

For instance, a research question could be, “How does childcare create independent children?” Based on collected data, the thesis may be, “Childcare, which is researched to find the best providers, can make a child independent in his/her study habits.” Notice that this thesis has a specific  point to  make about childcare and independence. The thesis statement must be  supported  by  research.

The thesis statement is the main idea of the research paper. All content in the paper refers back to or supports the main idea in some way. Sometimes, a thesis statement becomes the writer’s position in a persuasive argument. In many research papers, however, the thesis statement simply presents the main observation that the research reveals and explains about the given topic.