Making a Working Outline: The Basic Organization of a Paper

Welcome to the second column of The Writers’ Workshop. For this issue, we will be introducing the format for an academic paper as it would be written and submitted for review. Therefore, this column will be written in the format of an academic journal paper. The first thing to do is create the basic outline used for reporting research in academic journals. The format for many journals is the same. Differences between journals are usually limited to the font size, capitalization of headings, and in reporting references in the Reference section. Also, the balance, or word count in the sections is very important. A paper with six pages of literature review and a single page of discussion and / or conclusions would likely be rejected.