An Architect Outlines, Draws Diagrams and Maps Ideas

In the architect stage of Flowers’ writing process paradigm, the writer begins to design and depict the plans for a particular piece of writing.

Of course, there are several steps involved in creating an effective plan for a composition. As we discussed last time, composing a thesis statement to express the main idea and foreshadow the support for that idea is a good first step. After that, it takes a careful process of articulating both the thesis and support to design a sound, balanced approach to any topic.

One of the most tried and true ways to begin the planning of a full draft of a text is the technique known as outlining. The outline can assume many shapes, including a vertical listing of ideas, a diagram or flow chart, or an idea map.

The more traditional outline uses combinations of numbers and letters, in upper and lower case, to indicate the importance of and relationships between the different levels of support for the thesis.

By clustering the evidence around a few good supporting points, you can create an essay that is both unified around a main idea and coherent in that the connections to that main idea are easily explained and clear.

Drawing these connections in a visual format, and listing out your planned elements of explanation, can give you a solid footing for writing a first draft in an organized way, thus reducing the chance that highly extensive revisions will be needed later.

For Your Architect: Smile! You’re Onto A Thesis Statement!

As a piece of writing begins to take shape from the random scrawl of your madman, your architect begins to control the activities as you move to the next stage of Flowers’ paradigm of the writing process. Like most architectural tasks, having a blueprint will ease the process. The thesis statement is one such blueprint, or road map that you can use as a guide.

Your goal transforms from simply generating and including any and all disparate ideas, to narrowing and honing your topic, viewpoint and purpose for the writing task at hand. One important step in articulating your topic, viewpoint, purpose, as well as how you will achieve such a purpose, consists of composing a thesis statement.

A thesis statement can also be known as a main idea or controlling idea. In academic writing, it also often helps to foreshadow the supporting evidence that you will use to support your idea or viewpoint as you develop the rest of the paper. This can also help you establish an organizational scheme, because the order in which you mention your types of supporting evidence can mimic the order, or sequence, in which you will present the types of evidence in detail.

Another way to visualize the relationship between the thesis statement and the support for that idea is as an umbrella with many smaller points at the outer edges and corners, all merging into one main point at the top.

It simply works well when the supporting points maintain a solid connection with the main point, so that none of the spokes of the umbrella stick up and disrupt the ability of the shield to protect what is underneath. You’ve walked through rainstorms with a broken umbrella, right? The effect on your essay is similar when a connection between the support and the thesis reads tenuously.

Staying dry becomes much easier with an umbrella that has solid links between all of the points, and that’s the best kind of an essay, too. Everything you say needs to read like it hits the target that you establish in the beginning with your thesis statement.

At the same time, the thesis statement needs to be wide enough in scope to make for enough interest to keep the reader reading. If the reader already knows that your thesis statement is an irrefutable fact, then why take the time to explore why you support that fact with evidence? There is no reason to investigate a topic you already agree with unless the author offers a unique point of view and an interesting rationale for taking that unique stance.

Overall, you may need to experiment with several different thesis statements before you find the right one for your particular writing task. And sometimes you may use the thesis statement while you write, without including it in your final product. Each case will be different, but for academic essays, a good architect will start with a good thesis statement!