Transcript Lesson 13 Essentials Video: Organizing

CARA: If you spend a lot of time beforehand structuring it, making sure it all flows correctly, then the drafting almost takes care of itself, because you're just constantly thinking and revising as you structure it and as you put all the little pieces into place.

HANNAH: These are the points that I want to hit on from A to B. So what's the best way for them to get from here to here to here to here—what's the best way to format these dots between my destinations that is going to be the most clear, it's going to be the most scenic, I guess you can call it.

KENDAL: And sometimes even color coding it has helped me, and, like, pink is going to be your intro, blue is your whole body, and then green is going to be your conclusion. And then if you find one area that really needs to be in your intro, you could just move it up there, because the color helps me a lot, so.

HYESU: Basically I'll take the instructor's promise and make an outline of what it stipulates that I need. And it's very much a skeleton, I don't really believe in filling out an outline really completely.

NICOLE: The way I organize it is I pull out the claims that are most significant to what I'm choosing to write about. And so I'll separate those claims and I'll kind of organize my freewriting and fit it into those claims.

ANSEL: I never really realized you could use subheadings in papers when I was in high school, or even at the beginning my freshman year. But then one time, one of my professors was like—we were writing a 30-page paper, and she was like, I hope you guys have subheadings, because otherwise, it would be really horrible for me to read this paper.

And, I mean, after that, I started noticing, like a lot of the research articles that I was reading had subheadings, and for me, at least, the ones without subheadings were a little more confusing because, you know, they would talk about one thing and then go into a different thing without a clear transition.

YADIRYS: Outlining your papers is very, very important. I didn't do that for a semester. And then I learned—like second semester, I had the most detailed outlines. So that way, I knew what each paragraph was about, because my professor, she stressed that a lot, like, no what your paragraphs are going to develop into.

So make an outline. Like, outlines are your best friends, pretty much. Make an outline, know what academic—like, put your paragraphs down and know what academic work you're going to use in that paragraph, write that down, and like what your main idea for that paragraph is.

NANAISSA: You just can't say, just try that and it's going to work. You have to try it and check if it fits, and if it falls, to start it again.