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Temporary research outline

Research outline

The particular angle of vision of your limited thesis will automatically suggest and determine the temporary research outline you need to work with. If you formulate a thesis stating that humanity’s attempt to understand the basic phenomena of life is expressed symbolically both verbally in mythology and visually in art, you would be compelled to investigate the truth of that statement.

You would need to (1) find out how and to what extent mythology and art are symbolically expressed, (2) discover what basic phenomena of life are expressed both visually and verbally, and (3) consider how and to what extent the visual and verbal expression are comparable in expressing the attitudes and beliefs of their respective cultures. At this point you still may not be certain that you can find a sufficient basis for comparison, but it is obvious from the outset that these three basic concerns, which constitute the points of your research outline, must be investigated before you can conclusively state your thesis as truth. Similarly, a logical analysis of any thesis that you choose to work with will suggest the points for your research outline. It is important that you state them as sentences because only a sentence can state a complete idea. Then when you put them into the research outline, you will know exactly the point that you are going to make. They outline the path along which you and your reader must travel before the statement you first wrote as a temporary thesis can be stated as a valid conclusion and become your final thesis. A topic outline is too ambiguous to accomplish this task.

With the formulation of your thesis as a temporary objective and with an outline statement of the points by which you can logically reach it, you have the necessary criteria by which, with a minimum of wasted effort, to select books for your research paper bibliography and to choose information for your note cards.

In setting up your research outline you are actually using a deductive process. You have temporarily accepted a general statement or premise, and you are going to investigate your sources to see whether or not that premise can be substantially supported by facts. Because a generality would be too superficial to work with unless it is supported by specific and valid evidence, it is extremely important that you use the most authoritative sources available from which to find your information. You must be wary of unsigned editorial columns or magazine articles that are not carefully documented. For this reason, also, you must consult many different sources representing a wide range of thinking in order to make your paper valuable as research. However, in spite of the fact that your research outline is the result of a deductive process, your final thesis and outline must be inductively developed. That is, you must eventually analyze your material or the facts accumulated and change your temporary thesis so that it ultimately states an accurate result or conclusion of the material you have observed and presented. The temporary thesis, then, is the statement of a hunch or of an educated guess; the final thesis is the result of research and is a statement of what you now believe to be true. You see it as the only conclusion to which one could come from the material that you have selected and presented. And your outline shows the means by which you arrived at your thesis so that your reader can follow the process step by step with you.