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The Toulmin Outline
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The Toulmin Outline
Outline Elements Continued
support for your claim
Evidence/Authority
Conditions of Rebuttal
Responses
potential objections to an argument
additional evidence to support your claim and address the objection
Next Steps
Why do I have to do this outline?
Once you have an approved topic/thesis statement, you can begin work on your outline.
Outlines keep writers on track.
Outlines save writers time.
Look at the reasons in your claim and determine the assumption(s) that support these reasons. How controversial are these assumptions? Do they need evidence (backing)?
Outlines help writers locate research more efficiently.
The Outline is your plan of action for writing--it tells you what you need to present, and when.
If you want to write a paper first, you may. However, you must still present a Toulmin Outline to me, and your paper must contain the elements of a Toulmin argument.
The outline can show you which Toulmin elements are represented, and which ones still need to be done.
Purpose and Function of the Outline
1. All prewriting techniques help you test your ideas before you begin to write.
2. The Toulmin Outline, like other outlines you may have done, helps you figure out what goes where in an argument.
The Toulmin Outline is a bit different from the traditional thesis statement/topic sentence outline you may have written in your previous English courses.
What's Different?
The Outline Elements Explained
The Toulmin Outline identifies the elements of your Toulmin argument, but does not necessarily present topic sentences for specific paragraphs.
The Toulmin outline helps you visualize the case you are presenting.
the argument you wish to prove
support for your claim
Qualified Claim
Reason (s)
Warrants
Backing
underlying assumptions that support your claim
The Qualified Claim
evidence that supports any controversial warrant(s)
If you have looked at the outline, you may notice that the claim and the qualifier are separated, but that I am asking you to create a qualified enthymeme (a qualified claim+reasons).
I ask students to present a qualified enthymeme in this outline because I want students to have more practice creating strong qualified claims. This skill is one of the keys to excellent writing.