CRJ/SOC/WGST 461: Gender, Crime, and Justice

An outline is like a blueprint for writing: it helps you develop the big picture and structure for your papers. Outlines list the themes that you plan to use to address your research question, along with their corresponding articles and evidence, and then organize them into an order that will logically build towards your conclusions and answer to your research questions.

• Build Your Outline: Steps
• Build Your Outline: Basic Form & Structure

Step 1: Identify the information you want to use from your sources to describe your criminal justice problem and how gender impacts it.

• What key information, issues, theories, approaches, evidence, and/or arguments will you use in your paper?

Step 2: Are there relationships, links, and common themes between any of your sources ?

• What relationships and links do you see between the information you want to use from each of your sources?
• What common themes and arguments can you build from the information and evidence in your sources?

Step 3: List your themes and organize your articles under each theme. 

• What are the main themes, ideas, and arguments you plan to present in your paper to make your arguments about your criminal justice problem?
• What are the main themes, ideas, and arguments you plan to present in your paper to make your arguments about gender impacts your criminal justice problem?
• What articles will provide information about and help you build arguments for each of these themes?

Step 4: Arrange themes and arguments

• How can you arrange your themes and arguments hierarchically and sequentially so that they logically build towards evidence-based conclusions?
• These will represent the paragraphs of your research paper.

The main ideas take Roman numerals (I, II, III, IV...) and should be in ALL CAPS. Sub-points under each main idea take capital letters (A. B,....) and are indented. IF you have subpoints under these (A, B,...), they take Arabic numerals (1, 2,....) and are further indented. Sub-points under these (1, 2...) take lowercase letters (a,b,....) and are even further indented. Here is an example of this structure:

Gerrymandering in the U.S.

I. HISTORY OF THE TERM

II. REDISTRICTING PROCESS 

A. Responsibility of state legislatures

B. Census data

C. Preclearance

D. Partisan approaches

III. RACIAL ASPECTS

A. Gomillion vs. Lightfoot (1960)

B. Civil Rights

1. Voter discrimination

a. Voter suppression tactics

2. Voting Rights Act (1965)

3. Majority-minority districts

IV. CURRENT EVENTS

A. Effects of gerrymandering in 2012 and 2016 elections

B. Gill v. Whitford Supreme Court Case

V. CONCLUSIONS