Outline, Rationale, & Abstract Lab

What is your topic?

My topic is trade networks - particularly the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean trade network - and how they were linked to and affected culture in the places they influenced: the Mediterranean, the Middle East, the East coast of Africa, and Asia (especially China and India). More specifically, I want to demonstrate that the importance and the historical legacies of these trade routes are badly misunderstood in common knowledge. Also to teach readers about the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean trade network more generally, to create a foundation for the rest and to correct some mistaken assumptions about what they were really like.

What do you think about your topic?

Every culture in every time period has the unfortunate habit of categorizing all the world into ‘us’ and ‘other’. I intend to prove that our perception of these trade routes have been affected by these faulty assumptions. Where these attitudes and misconceptions persist, we are unknowingly self-centered. Where this is true, we are crippled in an increasingly global world. It is not good not to understand that, say, China and India had and have agency independent of us in a world where our economies are completely interdependent and the distance between us is reduced to not months but mere hours.

What do you know about it?

A collection of some details: Marco Polo has little to do with the reality of the Silk Road. Most land trade and a great deal of ocean trade was composed not of long journeys, but of short trips. A study of material culture in India and China especially shows clear exchange and exchange that has nothing to do with, say, the Roman Empire. Traders from the Mediterranean were a very small part of Silk Road trade, barely a trickle. Africa was a very large part of global trade in the same period, especially through the Indian Ocean trade network. This trade did take place in NETWORKS, and each node was not only a stop on the road but a destination in its own right, with its own products and culture and influence. And so on and so forth and in greater detail.

What is your claim about the topic?

Cultures we see as ‘other’ can and do relate to one another independent of ‘western culture’, and that cultural exchange is not one-way or even two-way, but a global melting pot with lines of influence moving in all directions. Lots of rich traditions, lots of independent and also interconnected histories.

What is your stance on the issue you’re writing about?

US common knowledge provides a shallow and overly simplistic view of the nature and impact of historical trade networks, and my readers, at least, should be able to learn more from my paper. My paper will be aimed at convincing my readers that there IS something more to learn, and that they MAY have unexamined assumptions, and to provide the information and perspectives that will encourage them and help them to examine them.

Which sources back you up?

All of them right now, to be honest -- most of them are about various things to do with one or the other of the two major trade networks I’m examining, and my use for them is as sources of information. There are a few sources MENTIONED in my current sources that I can seek out that make assertions that directly oppose my own ideas, but since most of my argument at present is “this thing you never thought about exists and it’s REALLY COOL”, everything I’ve found so far that falls within my topic has supported my thesis, since my thesis is basically “this exists and it’s cool let me tell you more.”

How about the sources you disagree with?

Like I said, I’ve heard of a few that were cited in my other sources, but I haven’t been able to seek them out yet. Mostly they’re papers and other sources that take a very Western/Mediterranean-centric point of view of what the Silk Road was and what it meant. I will have to keep searching for some of these. Though to be honest, on the whole my stance is not one that sees much opposition. It is not a difference of opinion between two groups, but rather the fact that one group doesn’t even realize there’s something there to have any opinion about.

Chapter 20

Chapter 20 is a short overview on citation styles and proper documentation of sources. There are several documentation systems, all of them associated with different disciplines, and they all have their own rules for documenting sources.

If I were writing my own paper for submission in a scholarly magazine, I would want to use APA if I were submitting to a magazine with a focus on sociology, anthropology, or political science, and I would want to use Chicago if I decided to submit it to a primarily historical magazine instead.

Chicago would be my most likely choice, and a history magazine the best match for my paper’s topic. Most of my sources have used the Chicago style. It’s characterized by in-text citations in the form of footnotes -- a superscripted number at the end of a point that needs citation, with the matching citations arranged at the bottom of each page. These citations are repeated at the end of the document in a works cited list.

Chapter 17

In my personal opinion, revising and editing are the most important parts of the writing process no matter which discipline you’re writing for. I don’t know that the book shares my opinion.

Certainly it presents the revision process as a time when you should question and reaffirm absolutely every element of your work, to be very thorough and to carefully examine every choice you’ve made so far. I agree with this.

Some useful tips for editing:

• double-check quotations, facts and figures, and spelling for accuracy.
• focus on ensuring that every statement you’ve made is stated as plainly and as efficiently as possible.
• edit for consistency -- consistency in your formatting, in your treatment of concepts and ideas, in your methods for writing out numbers, and perhaps obviously your citation methods for your sources.

Quality editing takes time and relentless thoroughness. The book recommends reading your entire paper backward sentence by sentence or even word by word. Other than that, don’t be afraid to mark up your document and make lots of changes, and don’t depend overmuch on automated editing tools. Microsoft spellcheck has more than its fair share of foibles.

Finally, the book would remind us emphatically that outside feedback is one of the most valuable resources we can find, for revising and editing. Well, in some situations it can be difficult to acquire outside feedback. Still, a fresh perspective can spot things the writer can’t -- like points that weren’t explained clearly enough, or simple errors the writer might have passed over simply because they’ve seen the paper so many times.

Chapter 14

Chapter 14 is on drafting. It’s an effective strategy to work from an outline when you start drafting, though it’s important to consider your outline as a guide rather than a hard and fast blueprint.

The building blocks of your draft are your paragraphs, so you want them all to be effective. It’s important to focus each paragraph on a specific idea or concept. Paragraphs should be organized according to some consistent rationale; chronology, cause and effect, process explanation, and compare/contrast are all possible ways to set up and organize your paragraphs.

When drafting, it’s important to keep your reader’s attention and to use your sources correctly. To this end, always seek to use as much detail as possible, though all the details you present should be relevant. The information from your sources should be well-integrated into your own prose and argument, but also clearly cited and delineated. Keeping your reader’s attention and comprehension can also depend on consistent and effective transitions, and the chapter provides examples of some of these.

The next section of the chapter goes into strategies for constructing an effective introduction in particular. There are a variety of ways to construct an interesting and effective introduction, and you’ll want to select one of the ones the book describes based on your own writing situation, subject, goals, and target audience. The chapter also provides advice for structuring your paper to be easily followed, and closes with a section on conclusions with similar advice to the section on introductions. What stands out as ideas to keep in mind for writing a conclusion: you’ll almost certainly want to link back to your introduction, and your link should use a technique that complements the ones you used in the intro. Further, a conclusion ought to offer something like extra analysis, speculation, a question, or a call to action depending on your writing circumstances, your goal, your subject, and your intended audience.

It sounds repetitive, but then again repetition is one of the best ways to really get ideas through to people.