"outlining" literature search

"Outling" literature search | Pinkie | September 7th, 2000

Simon:

I've had a brief look for stuff on "outlining", and more generally on composing processes. It's something that interests me myself, so I've enjoyed looking into it. Here's what I found...

[By the way: is this still TDA? Perhaps more MET or CSD?].

1) Some native-speaker style manuals recommend outlining: e.g. the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (4 th ed., p31) says, "Writing from an outline helps preserve the logic of the research itself. An outline identifies main ideas, defines subordinate ideas, helps you discipline your writing and avoid tangential excursions, and helps you notice omissions".

I have a book called "Successful scientific writing: a step-by-step guide for the biological and medical sciences" (JR Matthews, JM Bowen, RW Matthews; CUP 1996) that dedicates 3 pages to outlining strategies (p 13-16), including the following which seems to me particularly interesting in view of the tie-in to discourse analysis:

"Outlines help to establish a consistent pattern. Some common patterns are:

• Chronological: documenting the sequence in which something happened;

• Geographical or spatial: based on the physical arrangement of entities;

• Functional: examining how parts work;

• Order of importance: usually with elements in order of decreasing importance;

• Possible solutions: from least to most likely or best, or building to a climax;

• General to particular, or particular to general;

• Simple to complex;

• Pro and con: presenting both sides of an issue or decision;

• Cause and effect".

By contrast, Day ("How to Write & Publish a Scientific Paper", 5 th ed.) recommends preparing an outline only for review articles, on the grounds that normal articles (as you have pointed out) follow the IMRAD format or a variant thereof.

2) Possibly relevant references from the TESOL literature include the following (as well as the St John 1987 article I mentioned in a previous mail). Note that most are from the American "freshman writing course" tradition, and thus in my opinion only indirectly relevant to postgraduate and professional-level academic writing (i.e. research writing for publication):

AU: Parkhurst, Christine
TI: The Composition Process of Science Writer
PY: 1990
SO: English-for-Specific-Purposes; v9 n2 p169-79 1990
DT: Journal-Articles (080); Opinion-Papers (120)
Information-Analyses-General (070)

AB: Discusses the need for composition courses for non-native English speaking students who are majoring in science and technology to prepare them to write on scientific/technical topics. Unique differences between conventional and technical writing tasks are discussed, and teaching implications are assessed. [I haven't seen this, and will have to get hold of it].

AN: EJ35789
AU: Kellogg, Ronald-T
TI: Writing Performance: Effects of Cognitive Strategies
PY: 1987
SO: Written-Communication; v4 n3 p269-98 Jul 1987

AB: Examines whether the cognitive strategies of outlining and draft writing enhance college students' writing performance. Reports that outlines improved the quality of writing, but did not enhance efficiency. Rough drafts did not affect quality or efficiency. A survey of faculty revealed that outlines correlated positively with productivity, whereas drafting did not.

AN: EJ321154
AU: Raimes, Ann
TI: What Unskilled ESL Students Do as They Write: A Classroom Study of Composin
PY: 198
SO: TESOL-Quarterly; v19 n2 p229-58 Jun 1985

AB: Examines what is known about writing in both a first and a second language. Describes a study in which unskilled English as a second language writers in a "developmental" college writing course wrote an essay in class, compares the study's findings with the findings of some major studies of the writing process.

AN: EJ265804
AU: Zamel, Vivian
TI: Writing: The Process of Discovering Meaning
PY: 1982
SO: TESOL-Quarterly; v16 n2 p195-209 Jun 1982

AB: Argues that the emphasis of writing instruction in ESL classes should be on writing as a creative process, not on syntax, vocabulary, and rhetorical form.

AN: EJ282852
AU: Zamel, Vivian
TI: The Composing Processes of Advanced ESL Students: Six Case Studies
PY: 1983
SO: TESOL-Quarterly; v17 n2 p165-78 Jun 1983

AB: A study shows that advanced ESL students explore and clarify ideas and attend to language-related concerns primarily after their ideas have been delineated. These results call into question the prescriptive approach to writing instruction that is overly concerned with correctness. (MSE).

AN: EJ244006
AU: Taylor, Barry-P
TI: Content and Written Form: A Two-Way Street
PY: 1981
SO: TESOL-Quarterly; v15 n1 p5-13 Mar 1981

AB: The act of essay writing itself can serve to formulate thought and shape ideas. In the English as a Second Language classroom, this translates into an approach which places composition revision in a central position between content and written form. This approach more closely reflects the writing process.

ALSO: Shaw, P (1991) Science research students' composing processes, English for Specific Purposes, 10 (3) - I haven't been able to find a copy of the Abstract yet. A summary of his findings is given in "English for Academic Purposes" (Jordan RR, CUP 1997; see p 168-).

Jordan also gives a list of EAP textbooks that follow the process approach ("Within the process approach, books are usually arranged according to the stages and sequence of writing. For example, variations on the following structure may be adopted: preliminary ideas, prewriting activities, the outline, getting started, the first paragraph, the first draft, revising, editing, proofreading, further drafts, etc"; Jordan p 169).

By the way, Jordan also has a section called "Summarizing, paraphrasing and synthesizing", with lots of references included: though this is not relevant to outlining, it is certainly relevant to the preparation of abstracts.

Apart from that, I assume that you're onto "Genre Analysis" by Swales (eg p.117-) and "Academic Writing for Graduate Students" by Swales & Feak (p. 210 on abstracts).

I've got a number of books to hand that deal more or less specifically with second-language academic writing (Functional and Systemic Linguistics - Approaches and Uses, ed Ventola, 1991; Academic Writing - Intercultural and Textual Issues, eds Ventola & Mauranen, 1996; Academic Writing in a Second Language - Essays on Research and Pedagogy, eds Belcher & Braine, 1995; Second Language Writing - Research Insights for the Classroom, ed Kroll, 1990) - but as far as I can see none of these contain articles that deal with draft-planning processes.

Perhaps Sue Wharton or Anthony Clarke (Freiburg) might suggest other sources?- Tom Bloor I guess we should leave in peace!

If you're interested: my own TDA assignment (pending approval by Sue Wharton) is probably going to be an analysis of forms of coreferential anaphoric reference in scientific texts, with subsequent consideration of implications as regards the standard scientific-style-manual advice to use "consistent terminology" (i.e. one entity, one name). [Advice I basically agree with, by the way - though in fact things aren't quite so simple]. I'm analysing a small sample of biomedical-research abstracts: not because I have any particular interest in abstracts, but simply because abstracts are short, self-contained units that are much easier to deal with than (for example) Discussion sections. YOUR COMMENTS (OR ANYONE ELSE'S) WELCOME!

Pinkie
Spain

Re: "Outling" literature search | Simon | September 13th, 2000

Pinkie,

Thank you for your search on literature relating to 'outlining'. I hope I become as efficient a researcher as you! What do you use? ERIC?

Do you mean that you're interested in assessing the extent to which academic writers actually use "outlining" as a writing strategy?

I don't think I will be investigating that, although it is interesting and, as Swales seems to indicate (1990, p117) there is much supposition about how RAs are produced. Especially, there has been little research into how abstracts are produced (p.182).

Or that you're interested in teaching "outlining"?

Yes, in as much as it has several useful outcomes.

I guess that much here hangs on your definition of "outlining", no? I mean, I'd guess that nearly all writers progress through a series of drafts (particularly now we've got word processors)

Yes, and particularly if you make use of the 'Outline' function of MS Word, as I often do now.

... and early drafts will very often show approaches that might be described as "outlining" (e.g. you temporarily leave a subsection out, with only its title; or you write a paragraph in note form); and at the other end of the spectrum, of course, some writers (my guess would be not many) may use a rigid planning approach that we might call "formal outlining". By the way, I can see the relevance of outlining and other draft-planning strategies to whole-article construction, but I'm a bit more dubious about its relevance to abstract writing, since an abstract is I think generally written last, as a CONDENSATION of a whole text: in other words, isn't it more of an exercise in summarizing than in outlining?

Well that's an interesting point. I think you're right. It makes sense that the abstract await the final form. But outlining can be used to write a summary of ANOTHER author's work. Manuals on precise writing advise this (Alexander, 1966[?] 60 Steps to Precise Writing, sorry, don't have the full reference on me here). A further point that comes out of this is that the IMRD format of scientific RAs appears to be their outline, according to the literature (Swales, 1990). What does this suggest about how scientific researcher utilizes outlining? Do the authors of RAs that don't follow that format so rigidly employ outlines more elaborately? Do they rely on developing an outline more?- It would seem likely, wouldn't it?

The references you sent helped me clarify what I'm doing. Specifically, the following two points:

1 Outlining is generally regarded as a writing process skill (part of the productive process).

2 RAs are too big and time consuming for students to produce (or even read, for that matter) in EAP classes. I am investigating the use of outlining as a tool to draw students' attention to textual organization, raise their awareness of genre styles and encourage them to, in Morton's (1999, ELT 53/3) word's, "transform information" into their own words. By summarizing other author's work, they can be exposed to various texts and genres. Although summarizing other authors' work (as opposed to summarizing their own, for an abstract) is not something they would not normally be required to do (except for paraphrasing, quoting and summarizing as Jordan describes in the reference you provided - "English for Academic Purposes" [Jordan RR, CUP 1997; see p 168-]), these are all skills that will put EAP students in good stead, once they are in the real world of practicing academia. Or so I believe.

At any rate, my students are not EAP students as such, but humanities students doing general English composition. Nonetheless, I find this approach informs them about how to write, much more than open-ended, creative writing exercises.

Simon

Re: "Outling" literature search | Pinkie | September 14th, 2000

You wrote:

"I am investigating the use of outlining as a tool to draw students' attention to textual organization, raise their awareness of genre styles and encourage them to [...] "transform information" into their own words. By summarizing other author's work, they can be exposed to various texts and genres. [...] my students are not EAP students as such, but humanities students doing general English composition. Nonetheless, I find this approach informs them about how to write, much more than open-ended, creative writing exercises."

Interesting points you're making here: I particularly like the idea of using techniques of this type to draw students' attention to text organization. I think I'll give it a try in class. Please keep us (or at least me) informed!

Pinkie

Re: "Outling" literature search | Simon Cole | September 21st, 2000

This is in response to Pinkie's request for more discussion on the above subject.

This week I introduced an exercise in class that required the students to make a simple outline of a text they had read last year covering subjects related to their major. (They will use the outline to summarize the main points in the text.) We struck a problem in the second paragraph because it was not a very clearly (or well?) written piece - it meandered about a topic without actually stating what the topic was. I've read somewhere recently (I think it was Robert Morton's paper in ELT Journal 53/5, 1999) that text should be carefully chosen to ensure its suitability to the lesson. That will help the smooth running of a lesson, but is it real English? Real writing often includes unclear thinking. In fact, in my experience it is no easy task to find an authentic passage (even a short one) that follows a rigidly linear pattern and lends itself easily to being "mapped out" in the form of an outline. Incidentally, I was originally attracted to the "power" of outlining by the Kitaos' composition textbooks, published for the Japanese market. They provide very neat formulas for writing, including the use of outlines for constructing text, but are highly contrived. In practice, I believe, outlines are drawing-board fodder. Like drafts, they are built to be reconstructed and ultimately discarded.

In the case of this week's lesson, the tactic I will take is that the students will have to make sense of the text as best they can. That means that they will need to learn to discriminate between what is clear and what is not clear, and formulate their outline on the basis of what they are certain of. Also, they will need to become aware of the fact that not all paragraphs have explicit topic sentences.

Simon Cole