CONTEMPORARY ISSUES PAPER OUTLINE1

Student Name

Your Tentative Paper Title

Rio Salado College

Thesis Claim: Your thesis goes here. It should be the only complete sentence(s) in your outline.

  1. Introduction
  2. Overview of your social issue

A.Detailed scope of your issue

  1. More about the scope here

B.Detailed description of who/what your issue affects

  1. Who your issue affects
  2. Even more detail

(1)Super deep detail

  1. Even more detail
  1. What your issue affects
  2. Detail
  3. More detail
  1. Analysis of the ethical, legal, sociocultural, etc., factors that contribute to your issue

A.Detailed analysis of the ethical factors

  1. Detail
  2. More detail
  3. Even more detail

KEEP SCROLLING THROUGH TO THE 2nd PAGE! IF YOU STOP HERE, YOU WON’T HAVE ENOUGH INFO ON YOUR OUTLINE.

You get the point, yes? So you should have the following Roman numeral sections for your paper. THESE ARE THE MAJOR SECTIONS OF YOUR RESEARCH PAPER:

  1. Intro
  2. Overview of the social issue: its scope, whom/what it affects, etc.
  3. Analysis of the ethical/legal/sociocultural/etc. factors contributing to and/or perpetuating the issue
  4. Discussion of significant challenges to solving the issue
  5. YOUR ACTUAL ARGUMENT** (This is almost certainly going to be the longest and most intensive part of your paper, and this is where all your subclaims go. Remember to build an argument with some momentum and connect your subclaims instead of just slapping down statistics and a quote or two!)
  6. Acknowledgment and refutation of the opposition
  7. Conclusion

You need to break the outline as far down as lowercase letters (a., b.)—that’s it. Double space the whole thing.

When you go to turn this into your rough draft, don’t think of each Roman numeral as a paragraph—more like a section. In your final paper, your intro and conclusion will be a paragraph each, your overview, analysis & discussion of challenges will coveranother paragraph or two, your full argumentshould run at least a fewparagraphs and your acknowledgement and refutation mightextendanother couple of paragraphs, depending on how much opposition you have to cover. This is not a five-paragraph essay.

WRITE A SOLID ROUGH DRAFT. Believe me, it will save you time in the long run.