Chapter 13 Summary

Chapter 13 discusses organizing your paper. This chapter goes over which organizing patter you should choose, how to arrange your argument and creating an outline. Having a well organized paper is important because it will help the reader anticipate or predict what will come next. There are many options you have when choosing a pattern to follow when you are organizing your paper. These are meant to help you construct your paper so your information is shown in the most effective way. Some of the patterns include, chronology, description, case/effect, pro/con, problem/solution and strength/weakness. As you can see a lot of these are comparing two categories and basing your essay off of that. The next step in organizing your essay is to arrange your argument. You can use these strategies to help arrange your argument, labeling, grouping, clustering and mapping. Lastly, you will want to create a outline. Your outline will become a map to your essay and is like a skeleton to your paper. This is where you will decide where certain things will go and will become the backbone to your paper. The reason for an outline is to help keep you organized so you don't miss any key things or repeat things. Having an organized plan to write your paper will benefit you in the long run because you have actually given thought to the construction of your paper.