Planning

Faigley, The Brief Penguin Handbook

Developing a Working Thesis
Organizing Main Points | Creating a Formal Outline


Developing a Working Thesis:

Once a writer has generated some ideas through prewriting, he or she needs to decide on a dominant idea and develop a working thesis-a sentence or group of sentences that state his/ her focus.

During the planning stage of the writing process, it is important to develop such a tentative thesis since it will affect the writer's decisions as he or she selects, organizes, and develops his or her points.

This thesis is called a "working thesis" because it is tentative and often modified by the writer during later stages of the writing process.

Without this working thesis, writers can get lost during the drafting process as they lack a controlling or dominant idea.

 

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Organizing Main Points:

One result of prewriting is that a writer is left with numerous ideas that are in no particular order. Since the writer might not be used to having so much content to work with early on in the writing process, he or she must pay attention to planning.

In addition to developing a working thesis and possibly researching the topic, the writer needs to organize the main points.

There are many ways to organize ideas for writing.

Some writers prefer a formal or informal outline; others like to use cluster diagrams or lists.

Regardless of the strategy the writer uses, organizing the main points of an essay during the planning stage helps steer the writing process to a productive end.

 

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Creating a Formal Outline:

The most common and traditional planning strategy is the formal outline. Much like its name suggests, the formal outline uses alternating sets of letters and numerals to indicate main points, supporting points, and details.

The development of word processing technology has encouraged writers to return to formal outlining to give their ideas a sense of structure before beginning a draft.

Since most word processing applications have an outlining feature, writers can develop and return to their outlines throughout the writing process and use the computer's functionality to automatically format the outline text.

While writers should learn the method for coding and formatting a formal outline, technology has made this planning strategy once again a viable option for most writers.

Example

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