Directions

for Outlining the Research Text

For this assignment, you will need to read and refer to the Overview to Outlining
Scholarly Books, Articles, and Essays. Be sure to revise your outline as you go along,
in response to your own findings as well as feedback from
your instructor and perhaps peers. Do not expect that your initial outline
particularly the rhetorical sectionwill look like the example provided.

This outline will be a challenge. It will get easier as the book progresses. It will teach
you how to read scholarly work, and it will accelerate and habituate you to
recognizing and writing persuasive academic, evidence-based discourse that you
will be able to produce quickly and efficiently by semesters end. It will also take
you deep into a single scholarly conversation, illuminating how academic and
professional culture use writing to produce and validate, as well as debate and share
knowledge. While immersing you in a central aspect of your course topic and
preparing you to join the conversation as a writer, it will also help you to
understand more generally how scholarly communities work and write. It is up to
you to do the second step, which is to generalize and apply what you are learning
here to other writing situations: how to identify and analyze a genre in a field (e.g., a
scholarly book, a grant proposal, an editorial, a press release) for its audience, goal,
plan, surface and deep rhetorical features, line of reasoning, arrangement. These
are the skills of a professional writer, and can be adapted to any writing situation,
presuming the writer also has sufficient content knowledge to credibly write to
members of the given community.

Outlining the chapters of the scholarly book:

1) Divide the outline into two parts: rhetorical and logical (see example).
2) Place the rhetorical outline at the top of the page. The rhetorical outline refers to
the entire book. Below the rhetorical outline, provide the logical outline for each
chapter of the book. Your outline should be a continuous document, as you add
outlines of the chapters assigned for that week. Revise the rhetorical outline as your
understanding of the book develops.
3) As you complete the outline of each chapter, make a note of its
keywords. Keywords are significant words, or sometimes phrases, that capture the
main ideas of the book. Librarians (as well as Google, Wikipedia, etc) use keywords
to organize information. You will be using one or more of these keywords later on as
the basis of your research project. Also be on the lookout for passages and footnotes
that you may wish to pursue for your research project.





Format:

Your Name
Author and Title of Book

Part One: The Rhetorical Outline of the Book
Proposition: (paraphrase the proposition)
Audience: Who is the intended audience? Do you feel that you are part of the
books intended readership? Why or why not?
Goal: What do you think is the writers goal? What did s/he hope her reader would
think, know, and do after reading this book? Did the author achieve these
objectives?
Plan: How is the book, as a whole, organized: what logical function does each
chapter play to demonstrate the proposition of the book as a whole (note: each
chapter has its own proposition and logical structure; in turn, each chapter is an
element in the books logical structure. Do not confuse the two. See Overview for
more information on this). What other rhetorical features distinguish the book and
work to persuade the intended audience? For example, the kinds of reasons and
evidence selected, the arrangement of chapters, word choice, images, charts,
graphs? Often the easiest way to detect such rhetorical features is to consider how
youve arrived at your description of the audience: jargon indicates a specialized
audience, for example, or the kinds of reasons and evidence selected may suggest
that the writer is aiming for readers of a particular political orientation; images may
point toward a visually oriented audience; numbers and statistics toward a
mathematically inclined readership, and so forth.

Part Two: The Logical Outline of Each Chapter
Step 1 Paraphrase and Logical Conjunction: Identify and paraphrase the
chapters main line of reasoning, aiming for simplicity and clarity. Regardless of the
order in which these may appear in the chapter, organize your chapter outlines in
this order:
Proposition
Reasons and Evidence
Counterarguments and Refutations or Concessions (these should follow the
element of reasoning they modify, which might be a premise, the proposition, a
reason, evidence for a reason)

Number your reasons. If there are premises (shared ground) that pave the way for
introducing the proposition, you may preface your chapters proposition with these
premises.

Parenthetically introduce each paraphrase with its logical conjunction. Use the chart
provided in the Overview and use the attached example as a guide.

Step 2 Function: Identify the logical functions of the chapter. All logical functions
should relate to, and derive from, the proposition you have identified. If you are
encountering many logical elements that do not seem to be supporting the
proposition you have either mis-identified the proposition or the logical elements
intended to demonstrate it; or the writing itself is problematic. Logical conjunctions
and functions should be a matched set, or there is something awry in your analysis.

Step 3 (optional for book outline): Following the paraphrase, evaluate the
effectiveness of that particular logical element (see chart for examples of terms of
evaluation).