4.1.5 THE WORKING OUTLINE
After you have used some method or methods to identify the major rules, policies, and assertions that control your argument, you should analyze how they relate to each other and draft a working outline that shows those relationships as you currently understand them.
If you were researching the Miller v. Albright case, you might come up with a working outline like the one below. (Note that these headings are not in perfect “point heading” form.)Working Outline I. This court should reverse because 1409 is unconstitutional. A. This court should apply an intermediate scrutiny test.
1. The statute discriminates on the basis of gender. 2. This is not an immigration statute, so no special deference to Congress is needed. 3. Even if it is an immigration statute, fighting gender discrimination and “illegitimacy” discrimination trumps immigration. B. This statute fails the intermediate scrutiny test. 1. There’s no substantial relationship between the discrimination in the statute and the achievement of the government’s goals. 2. There’s no exceedingly persuasive justification for the statute. C. Even if this court applies the rational basis-type test, the statute still fails because there’s no rational relationship between encouraging ties between parents and children and requiring a father to establish ties in a different way than mothers do. D. This court has always promoted the maintenance of family relationships.
Of course, this outline is not carved in stone. As you write, you may discover that some arguments are incomplete, while others are not worth making. You may discover that some sections of your outline need to be divided into two subsections, or that others are not worthy of a full discussion.14As with the research questions, your goal is not perfection; it’s to create an outline that is complete enough to get you started on your writing.
If any type of prewriting outline is too difficult for you, you may want to try writing before you outline. Keep your paragraphs to a reasonable length, and then, after you have written your argument, use the advice in Chapter Ten to write an effective topic sentence for each paragraph. Those topic sentences will reveal the main points you have made and the order in which you have made them. You can then use the topic sentences to evaluate the relationships among your points and to plan your large-scale organization, perhaps using some of the techniques noted in this chapter.