an Outline for an Essay

Top Tips on How to Do an Outline for an Essay

Outline is a crucial stage of essay writing process. It’s a skeleton of your future work. Having built it, you’ll get a clear idea about the structure of your piece and understand the actions you’ll need to take to get a truly impressive essay in the end.

There are no precise instructions on formatting your essay outline. You may use Roman or Arabic numerals, choose to write in capitalized or lowercase letters. The most important feature here is your convenience.

An outline for your essay requires little writing and a lot of thinking. We’ll help you arrange both in the most efficient and helpful way. Feel like writing the most solid and useful outline ever? Keep on reading then!

Find the Purpose

You need to clearly understand the intention of your piece of writing. Do you need to convince, teach, tell a story or study an issue from a certain angle? Hints to the initial purpose may be hidden in your assignments, but if they aren’t, look for the answers in your head. What do you, personally, want to achieve by completing the piece?

Once the purpose gets obvious, you’ll be able to choose your arguments and illustrative examples much wiser. Knowing where exactly you’re going makes the way far less twisted and arduous.

Know Your Audience

Before you start planning your outline, identify the people, who’re going to read your work. How much do they know about the topic? Are they professionals in your field of studies or completely new to it? Depending on the answer to the question you’ll choose your vocabulary and the level of complexity of terminology.

Creating an essay, you need to understand, that you have to appreciate not just the time you’ve spent writing, but also the time they’re going to spend reading. Thus, be as reader-friendly as possible. That’s going to train you as a writer and leave your audience grateful.

Work Out the Topic

Having gone through the stages, described above, you come to a truly important step: formulating your topic. In case you haven’t been assigned with one, choose something you’re really interested in. That’s going to turn writing an essay into an exciting and enjoyable journey.

A useful tip here would be to try to stick to all the requirements, posed by your professors: you want to impress and not enrage from the very first line, right?

Take a Stance

Having defined your topic, you need to evidently express what you think about it. That’s going to be your thesis statement. It’s extremely important for each and every essay you write, thus, you’ll need to spend the time to make it logical, engaging and concise. Make sure it’s broad enough to devote the whole essay to it and narrow enough to stay within the restrictions, posed by your assignment.

Get Your Proofs

Once the thesis statement is ready, you need to move to the main body of your essay. Usually, it will consist of 3 paragraphs, each starting with the claims, supporting your main argument. What will these sentences say? Think of 3 reasons, why your initial idea is correct. Now, write them down. Ready? Then, you’ve got yourself 3 topic sentences for the body paragraphs. Which is pretty great!

Add Details

Each of the arguments has to be supported by illustrative details. Two or three usually will be enough. Thus, now you are to come up with examples that demonstrate viability of your arguments. You don’t have to write full sentences at this stage. Just jot down your ideas: it might be the name of the author, whose work is relevant to the issue, or a significant date you want to mention.

Wrap It Up

Most of the time, your essay will be concluded by restating your original claim. Think of the reasons why your work is important. Now, rewrite your thesis statement with regard to these reflections. Outline the ways to encourage your audience to keep researching the topic and… here comes the final full stop. Your outline is ready.

The outline may change in the process of work on your essay. That’s perfectly natural. Its main function is to direct your efforts into the right channel. And if you’re writing an essay already – it is performed to the greatest extent!