Sample Student Essay Outlining Process
Introduction: I start the year by walking kids through the outlining steps below, on the board or a screen. For this activity, I provide students with an essay prompt (could be long or DBQ). I give them 10 minutes and over the first semester, cut that to 5 minutes to complete the process. Some days I just ask for the blank chart; other days, the completed chart; completed chart and thesis; etc. We look at one or two student examples and critique them (I have the luxury of a document camera for this.) On testing days, I remind them of the steps.
Outlining Steps:
- Analyze the prompt.
- Determine the historical thinking skill;
- Chart the prompt (see table below) including all aspects of the prompt.
- Brainstorm historical information and jot it into the appropriate cells.
- Develop an outline.
- Review the prompt.
- Develop a one-sentence thesis statement.
- Develop claim sentences that elaborate on the thesis, using evidence from the appropriate cell.
Prompt: Evaluate the causes and consequences of religious and intellectual movements[1] on American reform during the mid-nineteenth century.
Historical Thinking Skills: Causation
Causes / Consequences[2]Second Great Awakening / Reaction against deism, industrialism / Diversified Protestant denominations; encouraged work ethic, reform movements
Transcendentalism / Reaction against materialism, rationalism; European Romanticism / Spawned artistic and spiritual pursuits, communalist movements
Utopian Socialism[3] / Reaction against growing economic inequality and insecurity / Mostly failed communalist attempts[4]
Outline:
●Thesis: The Second Great Awakening, Transcendentalism, and Utopian Socialism developed out of the thrust toward rationalism, industrialization, and wage labor, having profound religious, intellectual, and social impacts.
○Claim 1: The Second Great Awakening and Transcendentalism’s causes are murky, but an argument can be made that they were reactions against deism and industrialization, strongly influenced by European movements.
■European influence evidence: British ministers, e.g. Finney, and Romanticism
■Both movements coincided with the societal chaos of industrialization; Slater’s Mill, textiles, putting-out system, etc.
■Emerson on the over-soul and transcendentalism
■Thoreau: Walden, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”[5]
○Claim 2: Protestantism, and thus American society became more diverse, and somewhat more tolerant.
■Shakers, Millerites, Mormons (big exception to tolerance!)
○Claim 3: Emerson and Thoreau influenced American thought immediately in their advocacy of communalism, ethics, respect for nature, simple living, nonviolence, etc.
○Claim 4: Utopian socialist communities (New Harmony) sought to resolve the problems of industrialization and wage labor in a humane way.
○Conclusion: These movements’ influences continued throughout United States history.[6]
■Utopian socialism influenced late 19th c. labor movement
■Margaret Fuller and women’s rights
■Transcendentalism’s influence on modern environmental movement (conservation, Thoreau and ecology).
■Civil Disobedience: Gandhi, MLK, Jr.
[1]As the reader, I underline the key words in the prompt that might become column or row headings in the charting of the prompt.
[2]Next I plot those key words into the chart as columns.
[3]Next, I brainstormed these movements as rows.
[4]These cells represent my brainstorming of evidence and explanations.
[5]For this outline, the causes column will become one body paragraph, begun with this claim sentence. Each cell of the "Consequences" column will become a claim sentence at the start of a corresponding body paragraph. (Each outline will vary.)
[6]Synthesis point?