from outline to draft

Balance your sources.

What this means is that you want to try to use each one of your sources about the same amount. If you rely too heavily on one source, even if it's an excellent source that says everything you need to support your paper, it leaves you with three problems:

So when you have the choice of two or more sources that say pretty much the same thing, select information from one source for one part of your essay, another source for another part, and so on.

Once you've formulated a workable plan (with some sort of outline), it's generally just a matter of fleshing out that outline to produce your draft. The beauty of the sentence outline (I know, you may not find it all that beautiful...*sigh*) is that you already have complete sentences. We will use all of the sentences already written (why waste them?), but we need to move from point to point smoothly, so we'll need to add transitions. We need to add the supporting information from our sources (that's the whole point of doing the research). Go through your sources and match quotations from those sources to your outline.

What the heck? Do I have to re-read all of my sources?

Not if you did things correctly. Remember, you photocopied or printed out your sources and annotated them. You only have to look through those sections that you highlighted and read the marginal notes you made explaining where bits of evidence might fit in your overall argument (paper). This part should not take much time as long as your annotations were thorough.

If, for example, your outline notes that you will look at Mac Brazel's eyewitness account, then find comments about that eyewitness account from as many of your sources as you can. You will select the best bits from one or two of the sources. Do the same (wherever possible) for each item on your outline. You are creating a sort of sandwich of outline item / quotation / outline item / quotation or two / outline item / quotation, and so on. For those quoted passages we will want to integrate them using the observation / quotation / explanation pattern mentioned in an earlier lecture. But we're well on the way to a solid draft.

Here's a portion of a rough draft that uses the words from the outline along with some supporting quotations from the sources:

There were glaring inconsistencies in the army's story. Over the decades the army could not keep its story straight. Either new evidence came to light, or they were just inventing plausible excuses to keep the public satisfied. In the late 40's the government reported that a weather balloon with a reflective skin crashed and was mistaken for a UFO by hysterical observers. One official report states, "The newspapers insisting that there was a cover-up at Roswell are just trying create a panic to sell papers. The remains of a test balloon were scattered across the landscape, and an untrained civilian could easily have mistaken this for just about anything, but that is all pure imagination" (Carey 215). The official view, however, does not agree with what several key eyewitnesses reported. Those civilians were not all hysterical or even untrained; by one account, "many were educated, and, in fact, there was both a scientist and an ex-military man among them" (Cameron). More surprising than this inconsistency between government and civilians, however, is that the official view given in 1947 does not agree with what the U.S. State Department printed just ten years later.

Finally, of course, after you complete your draft, there is the process of revision-- editing, formatting, and proofreading--which you need to do before turning in the final version of your essay.

If you would like to see more of a finished paper, to see how sources are integrated, how the student's voice is blended with source evidence, you will find samples in the Resources section of Etudes; just select "Essay Samples."

and here are a few faqs with answers that you may find useful