6.0 Organizing Information, Ideas, and Arguments - Overview

Core Concepts of this Module

As you are researching and reading the relevant books, articles, and documents, you are compiling more and more ideas, arguments, quotes, and data points. You have already understood the need to read some materials or some parts of materials more carefully than others (deep reading or analyzing with a fine comb), while only superficially reading less relevant materials or parts (shallow reading to save time).

The challenge now becomes to keep track of all the information you are gathering and then to organize it in a way that builds an innovative and persuasive argument in support of your thesis statement. The individual arguments, ideas, quotes or data points are like trees. However, now you also need to understand the layout of the forest. More precisely, you actually have to plant the forest in such a way that you make the most effective use of each tree to achieve a certain progression of arguments and ideas. How will you see both the trees and the forest at the same time?

The bibliography where you keep track of the material you have found is just a list and does not help much with remembering the information, let alone organizing it. Similarly, the actual sources themselves, the piles and piles of copied or printed materials you are busy reading, they are just that: unorganized piles of paper, even if inside there are many good ideas that you have underlined and annotated on the pages and maybe in summaries in the front or back. After the fifth article you will not remember what you read in the first and it becomes increasingly difficult to relate the different concepts to each other and to determine what belongs in the Introduction, in Part 1, in Part 2, or in Part 3 of your paper.

A traditional approach to the problem of tracking the information are filing cards with short summaries of papers or ideas or arguments. Such a database, however, is merely a highly condensed version of the stacks of photocopies. The same is true for the electronic upgrade of the good old filing card, namely an Excel file or similar database that does not only contain the bibliographic information but also a summary of the material. They are just lists or databases. The problem how to organize and sequence the material remains unresolved. This is where the concept of Mind Mapping comes in. A Mind Map is both a database AND an organizational structure. It is a gathering of trees but not a random or an alphabetical one. If done the way I will teach you now, it will become the structure of your thesis and it will do so almost by itself, as you enter the information one by one.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this module, you will be able to

• describe why you MUST NOT write your paper by sequentially summarizing, let alone paraphrasing the sources one after another in the form of a train;
• instead, you will learn to build a network within a paper where your arguments draw on multiple different sources and their critical analysis simultaneously;
• and you will be able to summarize how the network has to be built step by step from pieces of information, ideas, arguments, that do not come to you in a logical order and that the network will invariably get big and messy, not unlike your brain (Mind! Map) or the internet;
• and you will identify several ways of drawing up a Map for this network, some of which work better than others towards the goal of seeing the trees and the forest at the same time and organizing everything in a logical manner; and
• you will actually develop the outline of YOUR Mind Map!