TSO: Increasing Quality

Bad examples from web. Note use of detail, usually listed as subpoints that often have subpoints.

Topic outline

THM: Because our family has a variety of hobbies and interests, we get a lot of junk mail that we treat like junk.

1. Definition of junk mail:
   Bulk rate postage ; Advertising
2. Hobbies and interests of the family:
   Woodworking, Investing ; Gardening and camping
3. Lists sold by companies
   Farm, fleet, work clothes catalogs; financial brochures; Camping, clothing, and gardening catalogs
4. Junk mail as junk
   Clutter; garbage

Here I have dropped the subtopic sentences and written more detailed TS.

THM: Because our family has a variety of hobbies and interests, we get a lot of junk mail that we treat like junk.

1. Junk mail consists of advertising or soliciting brochures, sent at "bulk rate."
2. The hobbies and interests of our family reflect the kind of junk mail we receive, e.g., wordworking. stock investor, gardening, occasional interest in sports.
3. The companies we order from sell their lists of customers to firms increasingly remote from the original firms; e.g., sports interest morphed into clothing, campling and gardening.
4. We treat the catalogs like junk: looking at it seldom and throwing in the garbage.

Sentence outline

• Sample student sentence outline on electric vehicles and pollution.
• Sustaining the Health of the Oceans. The improved sentence outline is based on the original article above the outline.
• Can we make an AIDS vaccine?See suggested green topic sentences. Could you do better? Original article above outline.
• Evolution, Males and Violence
• Before and after sentence outline of instructor
• Before and after sentence outline for student papers on Nuclear Power Policy paper.
• Before and after student sentence outline on missile defense

Sentence oultine extracted from real article
CHE 24 May 2003 on "Evolution, Males and Violence" by David P Barash

• The maleness of violence is so overwhelming that it is rarely even noticed; it is the ocean in which we swim. [This was final sentence of first paragraph starting from the premise of an intelligent fish analyzing human behavior.]
• What might be called the "killing establishment" -- soldiers, executioners, hunters, even slaughterhouse workers -- is overwhelmingly male.
• The same gender imbalance applies to the uncountable private episodes of violence that receive little national attention but are the stuff of many a personal tragedy.
• Violence is also, by and large, something that men direct at other men.
• ... stand back for switch!
• But as field studies in animal behavior have become more thorough, the myth of the peaceful primate -- or non-murderous animal generally -- has largely been dispelled.
• Evolutionary biology has an answer, and it emanates directly from the very definition of male and female (gametes vs. sperm). This and only this is the meaning of maleness and femaleness: Sperm makers are called males, egg makers females.
• The consequences of that distinction are weighty indeed. (contrast males maximizing offsprings vs females nuturing them)
• Natural selection has outfitted males with the tools for success in male-male competition, much of it violent.
• In the animal world, human no less than nonhuman, competition is often intense.
• ... After briefly discussing monogony...
• As we come to species that are more polygynous, however, we find a steady progression toward greater inequality in size and aggressiveness, with males getting bigger, and more nasty to each other.
• My point is simply that because of the basic biology of maleness and femaleness, of sperm and eggs, males are more prone to violence.
• As to basic reproductive biology, human beings are pretty ordinary mammals.
• Time and again, and regardless of the methodology used to obtain their samples, anthropologists have come up with similar results: Before the cultural homogenization that came with Judeo-Christian colonial (and marital) doctrine, polygyny was the preferred marital system for more than 80 percent of human societies.
• A Martian zoologist, reporting on the species Homo sapiens, would have no doubt: Human beings are mildly polygynous by nature. Like other polygynous mammals, we exhibit all the hallmarks.
• ... article is at half way point, then going on to discussion of agression of the sexes outside of reproduction. In trying to understand difference between females and males the last two paragraphs have TSs:
• If the "answer" is that women are taught to react as they do, then I must repeat: Why are virtually identical patterns found in every culture on earth?
• And let's face it: Biology does in fact explain a whole lot, such that if we are going to intervene effectively, we would be well advised to understand the nature of our own predispositions.

Article concludes with tie-in with beginning:
Just like the fictitious fish with which this essay began, it is time for all of us to look around and acknowledge that when it comes to the social construction of sex differences in violence, the traditional view is all wet.