Best outline for research paper
Writing skeleton built on working thesis

Students can prepare an outline for a research paper if they know how to prepare one for an expository essay. Both the standard "five-paragraph essay" and the research paper are built on the thesis-plus-support plan. Thus, both can be outlined in a similar manner.

Draw writing skeleton™ from thesis

Moreover, just as students can develop a writing skeleton™ from a working thesis and use it to guide their essay development, students can develop a research paper writing skeleton™ from a working thesis and use it to guide their research paper development.

A writing skeleton™ is an informal sentence outline developed from the working thesis statement. You will find other pages about the writing skeleton listed near the bottom of this page.

What a research paper outline is

The research paper outline is a ordered of points the writer plans to make in order to prove the thesis statement.

Since an essay is relatively short, experienced writers can get by without writing an outline. However, even experienced writers are more efficient and productive if they work from an outline for research paper development. The outline nails down the plan and keeps writers from getting sidetracked.

The outline is concerned only with the body paragraphs. The introduction and conclusion paragraphs are not mentioned in the outline.

Functions of outline's working thesis

The outline for research paper development (as opposed to an outline for research paper presentation) outlines the working thesis.

The working thesis is a statement of what the writer thinks the research will show. It represents an educated guess. In research, there's no penalty for an incorrect initial guess. A "wrong" working thesis is just as useful as a "right" one in guiding research.

A working thesis does two things for the research paper writer: it narrows the scope of the topic and provides keywords for research.

For example, examine this working thesis:

Pride and Prejudice accurately portrays the social entertainment enjoyed by the moderately well-off English middle class of Austen's day.

The working thesis restricts the broad topic, Pride and Prejudice, to a far narrower focus. The working thesis also suggests several search terms:

By trying various combinations of the search terms, a writer could identify resources and/or better search terms.

The writer can, however, even develop major points for his literature research paper topic before doing any research beyond reading the novel. I'll show on another page how a writer can turn the working thesis into a writing skeleton™ using only information from the novel for that task.