1. Writing the Synthesis

2. Where to Start:
Start by reading all of the sources you’ve gathered for your paper. Highlight or underline quotes or ideas that you want to use in your paper. Let the tentative thesis and reasons we’ve sketched out previously guide you in this, but also don’t be afraid to change your thesis and/or reasons if they aren’t working out.

3. Organize what You’ve Read:
Once you’ve read all of your sources and taken notes about what you want to use, look at the passages you’ve chosen and decide exactly how you will use each passage or idea you’ve chosen. Will you use one quote for part of the background in your intro? Will you use another as support in one of your body paragraphs? Will you use yet another, which disagrees with your thesis, as part of your rebuttal? Label each clearly so that you will remember how you will use each.

4. What to do Next:
Next, you will need to make a sentence outline and decide how you will organize your paper, particularly the body.

5. Organization Strategies:
When organizing your body, you will need to use a strategy that makes logical sense with your paper and which strengthens it. Play with more than one way of organizing it to see what fits your argument best.

6. Organization Strategies:
One strategy is to allow your thesis to map out the organization for your body.
For example, if your thesis aims to articulate two related claims joined by the conjunction “and,” devote equal space in your body to each part of the thesis and make sure the first claim listed in your thesis is the first one supported in your body and that the second one that is mentioned in your thesis is the second one supported in your body.

7. Organization Strategies:
Example:
We should eliminate animal testing and replace those tests with computer modeling.
With this thesis, your first few body paragraphs will deal with why we should eliminate animal testing and your next few paragraphs will need to explain why we need to replace it with computer modeling.

8. Organization Strategies:
Another strategy is to organize by the strength of your reasons.
The most common way of doing this is by starting your body with your least powerful reason and then moving on to a reason which is slightly more powerful, and then after that move on to another which is more powerful still until you’ve gotten to your most powerful reason.

9. Organization Strategies:
Another organization strategy is to place paragraphs that have related ideas next to each other so that your reader is able to follow your argument without jumping around.

10. What Not to Do:
Do not organize your paper randomly, mentioning the first idea that occurred to you first.
Do not try to take on more than one reason per paragraph.
Don’t organize by using your first source in your first body paragraph, your second source in your second body paragraph, and your third source in yet the next body paragraph unless the ideas in these sources specifically fit this organization pattern.

11. A Note About Rebuttals:
As we’ve explored previously, your rebuttal(s) can go in one of two places:
A place where it logically makes sense (for example, right after a paragraph in which you make a very controversial point)
Or as the last paragraph(s) in your BODY.

12. What Should I do After I Organize?
You should create a detailed outline called a sentence outline in which you write out your thesis and each reason as a complete sentence and make detailed notes about which pieces of evidence go with each reason.

13. The Next Step:
Write a draft of your paper and see if your organization strategy fits with your argument. If it doesn’t, keep revising until the form and content fit together coherently.
Once you get your form and content in line, make sure that you have all of your MLA elements in order and edit your paper before you attempt the final draft.
After that, you will come to the final step: writing the final draft.