For a trend or issue or position paper with broad brush strokes, find 3-4 articles that resonate with the required assignment. Let's imagine you have chosen a topic like "Analyze the conflicts between sound educational practices and meeting the needs of practice for a graduate who can function in today’s health care environment." Let's suppose you found an article that seems to address the issue of such conflicts, and let's imagine that article is Health professions education and integrative health care. Here is what happens when I copy and paste the text of this article to Many Eyes (you can register for a free account). Firstly, I can generate a tag cloud on single words:

If you hover over any word, you can see how it occurs in context. The size of the font will give you an immediate feel for how important the concept is in terms of its frequency of occurrence. This will highlight the key concepts in your benchmark article quickly. These significant concepts are likely candidates for your own paper, and you can add any of these concepts to your Word outline, as cues or prompts once you start generating paragraphs. If you click on the top of the tag cloud, you can change the cloud to 2 word occurrences.

The next tool is a word tree. Enter any word or concept of interest and you will be able to see how that concept is used in context. You can click and zoom on any other words in the tree too.

Finally, you can grasp the entire cocneptual structure or footprint of the benchmark article by looking at its phrase net. The larger font concepts are more important and hovering over the links between concepts will show you their context. Presumably your own paper is going to reflect some similarities in conceptual structure: