4.2 Use Standard Structures To Convert Your Outline To Your First Draft

Topic sentences and concluding sentences restrict potential development.

When you finish your Chapter 2 scaffold, you next convert the scaffold into a complete first draft by adding sentences to every paragraph. Remember, the Chapter 2 method assumes each paragraph communicates a single topic. A paragraph’s topic sentence states the topic while the concluding sentence restates or summarizes the topic. You need to add supporting sentences to develop each paragraph’s topic and to strengthen the link between the paragraph’s topic and concluding sentences.

You can add appropriate supporting sentences by 1) thinking about your topic and concluding sentences and by 2) exploiting another scaffold, standard paragraph structure (Flower, 1989). A standard paragraph structure provides a template which restricts the supporting sentences you add to your outline.

The topic-restrict-illustration-topic (TRIT) pattern (Flower, 1989) provides one standard paragraph structure which uses supporting sentences to link the topic and supporting sentences of a paragraph. With the TRIT pattern, the paragraph begins with the topic sentence. The second sentence – a supporting sentence – refines or restricts the topic. The remaining supporting sentences develop or illustrate the topic, and lead into the concluding sentence which restates the topic.

The paragraph below, taken from a recent book (Dawson, 2022), illustrates the TRIT pattern. The first sentence defines the topic as ‘how a researcher used a network to challenge an assumption’. The second sentence restricts the topic to particular evidence used to challenge the assumption. The next two supporting sentences develop the topic. The concluding sentence restates the topic sentence in more detail, supported by the paragraph’s middle sentences:

“Farah used PDP networks to challenge the locality assumption. Farah demonstrated that lesions to networks produce dissociations, arguing that this provides evidence against the locality assumption. Her argument was that networks are distributed systems, not local. Therefore, the locality assumption is not true of networks. That these networks still exhibit dissociations indicates that dissociations need not be caused by damage to localized brain functions” (Dawson, 2022, p 128).

For the TRIT pattern to work, logical links must exist between successive sentences in your paragraph (Flower, 1989). Sarnecka (2019) describes an effective technique to establish logical links: the topic chain. Sarnecka points out every sentence has a topic (its subject) and a comment (what the sentence says about the topic). She notes you create logical links when each supporting sentence shares the same topic. “A strong, clear link is formed when the topic of a sentence refers to something already mentioned, preferably in the previous sentence” (Sarnecka, 2019, p. 247).

The paragraph below illustrates a topic chain. The first sentence introduces the topic ‘feedback loop’. the remaining sentences in the paragraph have ‘feedback’ as their topic; two sentences include the word ‘feedback’, and the sentence starting with ‘The agent acts on the world’ provides a definition related to the topic:

“Cybernetics explained behaviour by appealing to the feedback loop. Feedback measures the distance between an agent’s current state and a goal state that the agent desires. The agent acts on the world to decrease the distance between the current state and the desired state. A feedback loop cycles back and forth between an agent’s actions and environmental changes, constantly measuring the distance from a desired goal to alter or guide the agent’s future actions” (Dawson, 2022, p. 52).

Flower (1989) identifies several other common paragraph structures, including the problem-solution pattern. When you use the problem-solution pattern, your paragraph opens by stating a problem or question; your paragraph then communicates a solution or answer. For instance, the example below starts with a question; the remaining sentences provide a possible answer (humans differ from machines) and provide different evidence to support the answer:

“Do humans differ from animals and machines? Many scholars argue that humans are special because they use mental representations, a view rooted in 17th-century philosophy. Descartes) argued that only humans possess a soul or consciousness, and the soul’s essence is only to think. His notion of thinking resembles modern information processing. Modern echoes of Descartes are easily found. Bronowski writes that ‘man is distinguished from other animals by his imaginative gifts’. Bertalanffy argues that ‘symbolism, if you will, is the divine spark distinguishing the poorest specimen of true man from the most perfectly adapted animal’ (Dawson, 2022, p. 31).

Flower (1989) also describes another paragraph structure, the cause-and-effect pattern. In the cause-and-effect pattern, the topic sentence introduces a cause; the remaining sentences discuss the cause’s possible effects. In the example below, an assumption about human cognition provides the cause. The effects result from the cause; cognitive psychologists ‘must explain’ and ‘must adopt’ because of their assumption:

“Cognitive psychologists assume that cognition is computation: rule-governed symbol manipulation. As a result, they must explain cognition by appealing to processes that they cannot observe directly. Cognitive psychologists must adopt a philosophy of science different from that of behaviorism. Behaviorists criticized the cognitive approach as being non-scientific because behaviorists believe that functional decompositions do not explain. In response, cognitive psychologists adopt a different approach to explanation, one no less scientific than the approach used by behaviorists” (Dawson, 2022, p. 69).

Flower (1989) describes another paragraph structure, the chronological order pattern. When you use the chronological order pattern, your topic sentence introduces a sequence, causing the reader to expect the writer to detail the sequence in the paragraph’s remaining sentences. The example paragraph below implies a sequence – ‘reversing the major method’ – and then provides the sequence (‘First’, ‘Second’, ‘And third’):

“We recall a digit sequence by reversing the major method. First, we recall a word from memory. Second, we extract the word’s consonant sounds. And third, we convert the consonant sounds into digits—our responses to the experimenter’s running a digit-span task. We repeat the process for each word held in primary memory” (Dawson, 2022, p. 41).

In Chapter 2, I described using index cards to scaffold your outline. The outline produced from the Chapter 2 scaffold becomes a new scaffold, one which helps you create your first draft. In all the paragraph patterns introduced above, topic and concluding sentences place powerful constraints on what supporting sentences you can add. The existing topic and concluding sentences remove the myth of inspiration by restricting your freedom for finishing each paragraph’s first draft.

Your outline can provide other constraints to guide the supporting information you add to create your draft. Notes on index cards remind you to cite particular sources in supporting sentences. Additional cards remind you to add or discuss specific quotes, images, or tables. Your work creating the outline means you require less work – or at least less inspiration –when you create your first draft.

Again, remember to treat your first draft as only a draft. You do not need perfection because you aim to ‘get the first draft down’ (Lamott, 1995). When creating your first draft, you do not need to create ideal supporting sentences. Expecting imperfections in your first draft provides you with another advantage. You need not write everything down when you create your draft.

For example, in my first draft of Chapter 4, I referred to other sections of the book, or I realized I did not have a date or a page number for a quote’s citation. I did not immediately break away from drafting to look up the missing information immediately. Instead, I added question marks and highlighted them in yellow. The yellow reminds me to take a minute to find the missing information – later!

Highlighting issues to resolve later illustrates another advantage of your scaffold: the principle of modular design. Engineers adopt the principle of modular design when they create parts of a project independently of other parts. You need not develop your whole project at once. By emphasizing paragraphs as your manuscript’s core components, you compartmentalize your work, drafting one paragraph at a time (Lamott, 1995).

You can also exploit the principle of modular design by doing ‘grunt work’ on a draft when writing supporting sentences tires you out. For example, you can take time away from writing, but still develop the draft, by completing component tasks: dealing with highlighted missing information, drafting a figure or a table, adding citations, and so on.

As my draft develops – even in modules – I use my draft to scaffold itself. I like to take time to read my fully drafted paragraphs out loud before I proceed to add supporting sentences to flesh out other paragraphs in my outline (Becker, 2020). I find reading out loud helps me maintain my voice when I turn to adding new sentences later in the draft. Using my existing draft to scaffold its remaining paragraphs once again illustrates the principle of modular design.