Crafting the Inner Shape
Once you've narrowed your focus and sorted through your accumulated data for the information that's relevant to your thesis; once you've examined the quality of your thinking and further developed those ideas you treated superficially the first time through; once you've grimaced and deleted the irrelevant fluff that was helping you make the page minimum called for by an assignment, your next step is figuring out some rational way to present your thesis and supporting information to the reader. In other words, you have to consider how to organize your insights in writing. The outer form provides a kind of corral that determines what will and won't be included in your draft; when you craft the inner shape, you herd the contents into some kind of order within the corral.
You may have learned the "five-paragraph essay" in high school or earlier: present your thesis in the opening paragraph, along with three supporting statements; use the next three paragraphs to elaborate on each of your supporting statements; summarize your essay in the fifth and final paragraph. The chief virtue of the five paragraph essay is that it does emphasize structure in writing; however, very, very few writing projects can really be accommodated to its very limited form. College papers in particular are usually too complex to be effectively handled in just five paragraphs.
Another drawback to the five-paragraph essay is its essentially static nature. It doesn't really encourage or accommodate careful and complex reasoning; it lays out your ideas as if they were dead fish on a slab, when what you really want to do is build connections between and among them. Most five-paragraph essays can be easily translated into a bulleted list, and a list inevitably slights the connective tissue that leads the reader through the various items it contains.
The five-paragraph essay may have been a useful tool when you were in high school (and can still be a lifesaver on essay exams), but it won't be adequate for the more sophisticated assignments you'll tackle as an undergraduate. Fortunately or unfortunately, there is no template, no formula, you can follow to craft well-structured essays. Form, as the Bauhaus architects used to say, must follow function--that is, you have to strategize the structure of each of your essays based on what and how much you have to say, and what effect you want your writing to have on the reader.
There's no single "correct" form for any given essay. There are a variety of ways you can structure any piece of writing; you should experiment as you revise, moving paragraphs around, drafting different introductions, adding and removing paragraphs. Play with structure the way you play with your clothes when you're dressing for a special event--try things on and assess the results. If you're not happy, try something else.
To play with structure effectively, you need to be able to think about the material of your paper in modular units, or blocks, that you can shift around. Think about reorganizing furniture: you can put the sofa against the wall, or under the window, or across the middle of the room, but it remains a sofa; what changes is where you're putting it and how it relates to the rest of your furniture. I conceptualize blocks as fairly fluid entities; single paragraphs can be considered blocks, but a group of paragraphs can also constitute a block (a bigger block, perhaps, comprised of smaller blocks). The critical point here is identifying those units for yourself; you need to be able to step back from your ideas to organize them into related categories that you can manipulate.
Obviously, it helps if your paper is pretty well-developed by the time you start thinking about structure; if you're still drafting new material, or expanding on your ideas, then it might be premature to work very diligently on structure. On the other hand, once you begin to think about how to structure your essay you often discover significant gaps in your reasoning or research. Be prepared to go back to the preliminary stages of writing to fill out those areas that you now realize are obviously underfurnished (maybe you really do need to get a coffee table to complete the room).
ASSESSING STRUCTURE:
1. Paragraph-by-paragraph summary outlines (a/k/a "glossing")
The most basic block of any piece of writing is the paragraph. Paragraphs are specific to writing; we speak in sentences, but we don't generally speak in paragraphs. There's nothing spontaneous about them--more than anything, paragraphs reveal the premeditated nature of writing. They're constructed; writers organize their material into the units that make sense for any particular writing project.
Paragraphs are the structural workhorses of writing; I like to think of paragraphs as the employees of a paper, and as such, each needs to have a job description. The more conventional term is "topic sentence"--the sentence that makes clear the purpose of the paragraph, its main point. Not all paragraphs have explicit topic sentences, of course (although I'd recommend you write a topic sentence for each paragraph if you're still an anxious and somewhat inexperienced writer). With or without an explicit topic sentence, however, you should be able to clearly state what each paragraph does for your paper--how it contributes to your argument, how it relates to the thesis driving the entire paper, how it moves the paper, and therefore the reader, closer to understanding your overall point. In other words, you should be able to state what makes any given paragraph a necessary employee who contributes positively to the workplace. As with employees, no paragraph should be allowed to take on more work than it can efficiently accomplish; likewise, no paragraph should be allowed to just hang out by the water cooler, taking up space and trying to look busy, or to repeat the efforts made by another paragraph. (I refer to paragraphs that don't really make a contribution as "styrofoam.")
Once you've drafted a paper, you can craft a paragraph-by-paragraph outline. Write a one-sentence summary of each paragraph, leaving a space between each sentence. Don't use your existing topic sentences--rather, reread the paragraph and write a sentence that genuinely summarizes its point (you might want to compare it to your existing topic sentence, however, to see how well your intended topic sentence actually covers the paragraph you wrote). Focus on the job the paragraph accomplishes--what's the critical idea here the reader needs to take away?
You can then compare the summary sentence to the paragraph as a whole. Have you in fact written well-focused paragraphs, or have you committed random acts of indentation? Do your paragraphs clearly contribute to establishing your thesis? Are there sentences in your paragraphs that now seem irrelevant--sentences whose purpose is unclear to you? Have you moved into the realm of TBNI or TBNR ("True But Not Interesting/Relevant")? Or sentences that you feel are, in fact, relevant, but whose relevance is only implicit? Don't assume the reader will make the connections you'll make; you'll want to revise those sentences to highlight their importance to the paragraph as a whole.
When you're done, you can read through all your summary sentences and try to follow the logic that gets you from one paragraph to the next. Try inserting transitional words between the summary sentences that indicate the logical relationship that connects one paragraph to the next. Some examples of transitional words: "furthermore," "in addition," "indeed," "and" (all of which express a continuation or an intensification of a particular idea); "however," "but," "yet" (indicating a change in the reasoning, consideration of an opposing view or contradictory evidence); "nevertheless" "just the same" (returning to the main line of argumentation); "consequently," "therefore," "so" (introducing the results or conclusions to be drawn from the line of reasoning being pursued); "because," "since" (indicating a cause-and-effect relationship between two ideas); "for instance," "for example" (introducing specific illustrations of the previously stated idea). If the relationship between sentences is unclear to you, try moving sentences around to see if some other order makes more sense.
Constructing a paragraph-by-paragraph summary outline allows you to play with structure efficiently, without immediately carving up your actual paper. And if you create your outline on the computer, it's easy to shift the sentences around in the list and change the transitional words connecting them to try on different structures.
A paragraph-by-paragraph outline will also help you to diagnose the coherence of your individual paragraphs: Can this paragraph really be summarized in a single sentence? Does that sentence really cover all the ideas conveyed in the paragraph? And by extension the outline will also help you assess the coherence of your paper as a whole: Does it make sense to tackle these ideas in the order that I've chosen? Is the logical relationship between my paragraphs clear? Might some other order make more sense?
2. "Blocks" and Conventional Outlines
You can use the idea of a block--a unit of meaning composed of one or more paragraphs--to look at larger units of meaning and purpose in your writing. Blocks are determined not by length, but by intention; related paragraphs (for instance, in your paragraph-by-paragraph outline, a group of summary sentences all joined by transitional words that indicate continuation or intensification of an idea) constitute a single block. Like paragraphs themselves, such blocks don't exist in nature--they're not out there for you to discover. You create them, and you do that by organizing your material around specific purposes that you consciously construct.
If you can't find blocks in your paper--if every single paragraph seems to shoot off in some new direction, entirely unrelated to the preceding paragraph--you're probably stringing together a series of random observations that aren't building efficiently towards a thesis or a main point. Go back through your paper and look for paragraphs that deal with related ideas; you might also have to break down existing paragraphs if it's clear to you that they're not really paragraphs (those random acts of indentation). You might want to use different colored highlighters to identify sentences that can be recombined into more effective paragraphs, and paragraphs that can be recombined into effective blocks. You can then use the paragraph-by-paragraph outline technique to play around with the overall structure of your paper.
And again, don't be timid about playing around with blocks, once you've begun to recognize them or construct them. Would beginning your paper unconventionally--that is, with a block the reader might not expect in the beginning--provide an effective hook for a reader? Is the block you've constructed as your conclusion actually better as an introductory block? Do you want to open your paper with a block that covers the opposing view--and then devote the rest of the paper to refuting that view? Or do you want to make a passing nod to opposing viewpoints only at the end of your draft? How would each approach affect the reader of your draft? There's no single way to "correctly" structure a piece of writing; different structures will evoke different responses from the reader.
Some writers use conventional outlines to diagnose structure, too. You remember these:
I. Introduction
A. Overview of topic
i) General introduction of topic
ii) My thesis about the topic
II. The controversy
A. The received wisdom
i) Expert Opinion #1
ii) Expert Opinion #2
B. My perspective
i) Expert #1 is wrong because . . . .
And so on. These can be helpful for complex papers because they make visible the relationship between primary and secondary ideas in the draft: primary ideas get Roman numerals, supporting material for those ideas get alphabetical letters, and the evidence for those supporting ideas are expressed by lower-case Roman numerals or by Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3 etc.).
On the other hand, I always find classic outlines artificial and inflexible. They create empty slots and a hierarchical structure that we feel compelled to follow, whether they're appropriate to our material or not (what if I have only one expert opinion? is "my perspective" really a secondary point, or is it a primary point?). Conventional outlines are often little more than a theoretical framework that we then attempt to force on to our actual material.
I also tend to discourage students from outlining too early in the process, and certainly from using conventional outlines early on. Outlining too soon has the same effect (if in somewhat more elaborate form) of the five-paragraph essay: it gives you an abstract form to "fill in," regardless of what you actually have to say about your topic. If you routinely write outlines that actually look like the example above (which is to say, they're full of generic terms like "Introduction" and "Summary" and "Point A" and "Conclusion" ), then you're just creating empty categories without actually having anything to put in them. Yes--you'll probably write an "introduction" and a "conclusion"; does drafting an outline that says as much really help you? And you often end up with lots of empty spaces to fill up with ideas, rather than letting your materials and ideas determine the structure of your paper. It's rather like ordering a custom suit without having any particular person in mind for it--you'd have to find some random person who could actually wear it, instead of having it made to order for yourself.
But when a draft is in a fairly advanced state, an outline can be a great diagnostic tool: it can give you the necessary perspective on your entire paper to be able to assess its structure; it can also help you recognize which ideas you want to foreground and which you want to push into the background (artfully, of course); finally, if your paper is getting too long, it can help you decide what you can safely cut (generally, an idea that's pretty far down in the hierarchy--in other words, one that's been indented several times--is probably less central to your argument than a main idea).