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 The Online Writing Manual
Planning Your Paper: Genre and Process

Your planning process requires that you understand what is expected in the kind, or genre, of paper you have been assigned and that you use planning strategies to organize what your ideas in the pattern that most effectively communicates them. Follow the links to review some standard rhetorical considerations, organizational patterns, and tips for planning.

Rhetorical Considerations:

Understanding Verbs in the writing assignment

 The Planning Process:
  • Developing an Outline from Purdue University's OWL
    A useful explanation of the principles involved in outlining with a link to a sample outline
  • Questioning
    Develop a series of questions about your topic that you feel your paper should answer.
  • Framing your paper as an email message
    Write the short version, the summary, of what your paper will be about, thinking of it in the form of an email message in which you tell a friend or relative about the research you have been doing.  Use the sentences (or partial sentences) of your message as the basis of an outline that you will expand as you write your paper. 
  • Tree diagram
  • Flow chart
  • Scenarios (news report, courtroom scene, documentary or feature film)
  • Storyboarding
  • Web page or Power Point plan
  • Analyzing transcript of conversation in electronic environments

Go to suggestions for getting started with your writing.

Return to Online Writing Manual or Writing Center Consultants' Online Training Manual

By Alice L. Trupe, posted August 2001