Let’s face it — students make so many mistakes that it’s hard to whittle them down to one. To find the #1 dumbest mistake, I used specific criteria:
1) It wastes the most time and energy.
2) It actually forces the student to do more work.
3) It causes the steepest drop in grades.
4) It has to be completely avoidable.
5) It is DUMB (Okay, that one was pretty obvious).
So what is the #1 dumbest mistake? Writing a paper without an outline. This may appear to save time, but it wastes a TON of time and effort. Writing without an outline is like going on a cross-country drive without a map. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re going to get lost and then get eaten by a bear. Okay, so maybe you won’t get eaten by a bear, but you will get eaten alive by an angry teacher!
Teachers assign papers to see how well you prepare and organize your thoughts. Why do most students have trouble organizing their thoughts? Answer: Information Overload. Before you write a paper, usually you have to read books and articles and handouts. It’s impossible to keep all that straight in your head! This is why smart students create an outline — they write all their thoughts down, organize them into sections, and then organize those sections in an order from A to B to C. Instead of wasting time going in the wrong direction and going from A to V back to Q then to F, they take a nice smooth ride from Point A to Point Z. Basically, the outline is your map.
Let’s say I invited you on a two-hour hike through the wilderness. You and I walk through rocky terrain and prickly bushes and we even get lost five times. When we FINALLY get back to where we started and you have a wicked case of poison ivy, I turn to you and say, “Oh, by the way, there’s another path that goes past a beautiful waterfall and it’s much easier to navigate.” You’d say, “Why didn’t we just go THAT way?!” When you hand in a paper that takes your teacher on a zigzagged route, THAT’S how your teacher’s going to feel.
Remember: mastering point-to-point movement is the POINT. That is what teachers want to see when reading your papers. How can you master that movement/ There are several strategies out there. We’ve compiled a list of them, from POWER to the PROWL. They give you a map from A to Z so you’ll never get lost again. Take a look at them now so you don’t get eaten, I mean, lost later!
Get Write On It. 