ENG 1101 Outlines for College Essay and Paper Writing Advice

hello and welcome to English 1101 today I’m gonna be talking about outlines so and essay structure and and and things of that nature those of you want to follow along and patterns for college writing the 14th edition textbook for this course I’m gonna be looking at page 61 constructing a formal outline okay I want it I want to tell a story first about outlines a couple of summers ago I was tutoring a student that was not going to this university was going to another university and she was taking an online English 1101 writing course and her her professor made them do an exercise and do an official formal outline as you see in the bottom of page 61 and the frustration that she was having was you know getting the little A’s and the B’s and the ones and twos together and and putting them together in word and and I learned something from that from that experience from that teaching moment in that she understood what an outline was she understood how to organize her thoughts but she didn’t necessarily need to have the capability of constructing a formal outline so the one thing that I want to stress to you is that it’s not that important how you create your outline it’s important that you do and an outline could be if your look if you’re working a job as a waiter or waitress and in between in between lunch and dinner you you know those those rushes you have some time and you’re scribbling down notes organizing your essay on a napkin you know with a pen around around an old receipt or something or it’s just organizing your thoughts and and getting them down on paper and bullet points or on the computer and bullet points before you start going into the writing phase it’s important that your that your si have certain key features that are that are talked about in in chapter 3 in arrangement you need to have an introductory paragraph you need to have a thesis statement needs to be clear and concise we will we will get to those at length later but in order to organize your thoughts like you have to put it down somehow you can have it all up here and then just start writing but you’re doing yourself a huge disservice by by not organizing your thoughts first and getting it down actually writing can be so much easier if you create yourself a little to-do list or a little organization or an outline first and then when you go to actually write the essay you’re not just staring at a blank screen you have directions that you’ve written to yourself to follow you are doing your future self a huge service by allowing the time to think about the assignment and then putting it down on paper whether it’s scribbled notes whether it’s arrows pointing all over the place on a marker board or it’s bullet points in in Microsoft Word or however you do it it’s just important that you actually do an outline first it’s gonna save you a lot of time also I want to make mention that waiting till the last minute to write an essay is never a good idea first of all you haven’t had time to prepare you haven’t had time to get your thoughts down in a clear and concise order to help your future self usually were we’re so busy you know getting getting our future selves in some kind of bind like writing an essay at the last minute just before turn in or waiting til that final hour to study for a test or writing a paper but if you actually outline first again it’s not important how it’s done it’s important that you actually do it okay if you look at the bottom of page 61 it has a thesis statement as I look back at the cheating I witnessed I wonder why I kept silent and what would have happened if I had acted okay so that’s the thesis statement for this essay it’s the first person I say so you’ve got an organization structure the incident and under the incident you’ve got test situation my observation my reactions and my reactions also being a list of anger and silence being part of her reactions okay this is just one way to do it and then part two of my essay is gonna be reasons for keeping silent were other students attitudes my fears part three is current attitude towards cheating Effects of cheating on education Effects of cheating on students okay so it’s just kind of it’s a list and so as you go through and you write your rest and you’re like what was I gonna talk about next or you take a break and you come back to it and you’re like oh yeah I need to finish up this paper what was I gonna talk about next oh yes correct reasons for keeping silent excellent okay so you’re creating yourself like kind of a to-do list of the points you want to make in your essay and it can help you a lot in the future okay so it’s not important that you follow this direct directly it’s not important that you create the little E’s and Roman numerals and stuff like that I’m not gonna quiz you on on whether or not you know how to make an official outline it is actually become a smaller and smaller part of this book but what I do expect is that you think about what you’re gonna write before you sit down to write it and you actually take the time what most people don’t realize is that you say I waited to the last minute to write this essay and it took me four hours okay it could have taken you two hours one hour of proper planning outlining could have been on a napkin you know could have been on a on a notebook could have been on your phone you could have been talking into your phone I want to make sure I cover this oh yeah one more thing I want to cover this we all have you know we all have a note-taking device right here it’s very simple you just push record on the voice recorder it’s really easy so there’s a lot of ways to do it you can save yourself a lot of time you could have been spent an hour or half an our planning the essay and then an hour writing it and maybe another half an hour reading it over to make sure you didn’t smell anything wrong or grammars correct and all that stuff so instead of spending four hours we racking your brains sitting there at a blank screen and writing things and deleting things you could really save yourself a lot of time so when it comes to outlines I’m not gonna quiz you on the proper outline I’m not gonna tell you to make a formal outline every time you write a paper but writing an outline and this is an example on the bottom of page 61 in patterns is the most important thing you can do when it comes to invention and invention with regards to writing so I’ll see you in another video in a few minutes I’m going to talk about the assignment this week