Finalizing Your Outline

Please take out your outline Major concerns: Group One: Group Two: Group Three: Group Four: Group Five: Group Six: Consider, at the bottom, what your main concerns are about your outline or about writing your paper in general? Then, with your group, decide together the thing you think everyone is most worried about, and write them on the board For example: Are my quotes good enough? Do my claims match my theme statement?

Our Goals Today Finalize your outline Eliminate any quotes (evidence) that are weak or irrelevant (meaning, they might be about your topic or characters, but don’t actually prove your theme statement that well)

Example: Here is my theme statement In S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, the way that Johnny, Randy, and Dally struggle with their identities shows that when a person depends on the approval of others for happiness or validation, he will form his identity based on what people expect him to be rather than who he actually is.

Claim One: Randy’s struggle with pleasing his fellow gang members and doing what he actually knows is right shows how his dependence on his gang’s approval dictated his identity until the very end of the story and then he depends on his father to dictate his identity at the end. This shows he’s unsure of who he is because he’s always relied on other people to decide that for him. “Greaser didn’t have anything to do with hit. My buddy over there wouldn’t have done it. Maybe you would have don’t the same thing, maybe a friend of yours wouldn’t have. It’s the individual” (97). “It doesn’t do any good, the fighting and the killing…greasers will still be greasers and Socs will still be Socs…I’m a marked chicken if I punk out at the rumble, and I’d hate myself if I didn’t” (98-99). “It was Randy and Bob and three other Socs…Randy swore at us and they stepped in closer” (48). “My dad says for me to tell the truth and nobody can get hurt. He’s kind of upset about all this…I kind of let him down, being mixed up in all this…I feel lousy about the old man” (140).

With your group, go through the rest of my outline, and decide: which quotes are less important?

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