Today in class seemed to confuse a few of you, so I wanted to provide a bit of clarification in this blog post. First of all, the homework to complete tonight is a reading task not a writing one. You are to outline your "expertise book" author's "opening matter" -- that is the Introduction, Preface, Preamble, or Forward.
This outline is the "skeleton" of the author's argument, and our various authors will include these bits of "opening matter" in an effort to lay out the much, much longer work's cogent features and arguments. In essence, the "opening matter" in book-form non-fiction is a "road map" for the rest of the text, and, reading the "opening matter" along with the Table of Contents will provide a complete picture of the depth of the longer work's full revelations and insights.
I've found a relevant post from Salisbury University (in Maryland), and I will re-post the best bit here:
"The key to both outlining and summarizing is being able to distinguish between the main ideas and the supporting ideas and examples. The main ideas form the backbone, the strand that holds the various parts and pieces of the text together. Outlining the main ideas helps you to discover this structure ..."
So, you are outlining the main points (essentially listing the main points in an organized, tiered fashion). Your own outline will look nothing (really) like mine, as no one of you is reading To End All Wars. (I also sent you via email a handwritten, .pdf copy of the Google Doc that is linked in the previous sentence.)
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