Draft the body of the informative report from the outline, integrating in-text citations for each piece of source information as it is written.
Drafting from an outline is straightforward: each outline heading becomes roughly one section or a few paragraphs, written in the order that will best help a reader understand the answer to the research question, built from the paraphrased notes already gathered.
Cite DURING drafting rather than after. Every time a specific fact, statistic, or idea from a source appears, a citation goes in right then -- the source name in the sentence itself or in parentheses. Waiting until the whole draft is finished to add citations means facts get separated from their sources and easily mixed up.
Mastery looks like: They draft body paragraphs from their outline, using paraphrased notes and attaching a citation to each specific fact as it is written.
Common stumbles: Writing whole paragraphs first and trying to remember citations afterward; dropping in a fact with no source attached anywhere.
See it visually
Interactive, spoken-aloud tools that show this idea in motion.