Writing an Outline for an Essay
When writing an essay, creating an outline to the essay is the most effective way of organizing your thoughts, presenting your own point of view and learning the assignment. The importance of creating an outline cannot be underestimated. It plays a crucial role in the creation of a well organized and thoughtful essay.
In the following lines, steps are presented which can surely help you create an effective and organized essay outline:
Understand Your Essay Question
The first thing you should do when a topic is assigned to you is to understand what is wanted from you. Have a look at the question and see what type of essay would best fit its answer. Once you know this, it will be much easier for you to create the outline.
Know the Requirements
Read the guidelines if they are provided to you to verify the requirements for your essay. You should look for things like deadline, essay length and presentation style. Don’t hesitate to contact your teacher if you have any doubts.
Make a Thesis Statement
A thesis statement serves to provide focus to your essay and tells the reader what your essay or term paper will be about. Once you have made sure of the expectations from your essay, make a thesis statement and write it on top of your outline. It will not only help you think through your ideas and their presentation to the reader but will also keep you concentrated on the main idea of your essay.
Brainstorming
After you have written your thesis statement, start thinking about ideas that relate to it. An important thing to remember is to keep your thought process running all the time when you’re brainstorming. Write down all the ideas that come to your mind, even if they sound incomplete or ridiculous. Once you have ample ideas, go through them and filter out all that seem useless to you.
Gather Evidence
Your ideas are not worth much if they cannot be supported by evidence. So, you need to go through your resources to find specific examples or opinions of others. Don’t ignore the source you use on regular basis. Examine your lecture notes and handout, articles in journals or text referred to you by your teacher. Make sure that you go through multiple sources to back the ideas presented in your essay.
Organize Your Ideas
Once you have ideas and evidence to prove your ideas, it’s time to organize them in a logical manner. There are no specific standards to organizing your ideas. They can be presented in a simple or complex form, and, they can be specific or general in nature. When organizing your ideas, don’t use too many words. Just write them as brief one-liners and arrange them in a series of headings or subheading. You can use bullet points to provide a description of the contents of each paragraph.
Keep the References
While you are gathering information, make sure you write down every source that you have consulted, as you go along. This will prevent you from the needless headache of searching for references again, once you have written your essay.
By working out on the plan mentioned above, you will be able to create an outline with everything that you will need when you actually write the essay and save you from a lot of hurdles of essay writing.