[This is for English for Academic Purposes students to help them brainstorm their ideas about their research project, and produce an outline. The hints for writing a thesis, at the bottom of the paper, are not my own but taken from Pathways 4 published by National Geographic Learning
In addition to the brainstorming activities below, I also sometimes use a freewriting worksheet: Google: drive, docs, pub]
Brainstorming
Step 1: 10 minutes.
Write down all the words that you can think of connected to your
topic. Don't worry about how you will
use them, or whether they are important or not.
Just concentrate on writing down as many words as possible.
Step 2: Now, see if
you can find connections between any of your words. Go through and try to connect similar
words. You may want to circle all of the
connected words with the same color pen.
Step 3: Now, sort the words into different boxes. In each box, put only words that are
connected to each other. (Sometimes you
may use the same word in more than one box.)
Step 4:
Choose two or three boxes that you want to focus on for your
paper. Write down the related words
again, and see if you can come up with a title for each category.
Title:
______________________________
|
Title:
______________________________
|
Title:
______________________________
|
Assignment:
Write an outline for your paper. This can be a simple outline. (That is, you do not need to include all of
your supporting details at this point.)
You should include:
* Your Thesis (the main idea or the main point of your
essay)
* Your Outline of Structure/ Essay Map (A sentence which
lists all the main points of your paper in the order that they will
appear. This usually is the last
sentence in your introduction)
* Your main points.
(You do not need to include all of your supporting details).
Hints for writing a thesis:
Individual paragraphs have main ideas. Similarly, essays have main ideas. A thesis statement is a statement that
expresses the main idea of an entire essay.
A good thesis has the following characteristics:
* It presents your position or opinion on the topic.
* It includes the reasons for your opinion or position on
the topic.
* It expresses only the ideas that you can easily explain in
your body paragraphs
* It includes key words that connect with the topic
sentences of the body paragraphs
(Pathways
4, p. 42)
No comments:
Post a Comment