So, you were assigned an essay. Maybe you are starting early, or maybe you’re waiting until the last possible second. Either way, you’re stuck. I can promise you that making an outline will help. Maybe it will only be small steps, or it might shape the entirety of your essay. It can help you reorganize something you’ve already done, or assess the strength of your thesis statement.
For more information about generally making and customizing an outline, continue reading. To see examples of a developed outline, jump to the section titled “My Personal Method”.
Common Questions:
When do you make an outline?
- Outlines can be written at any stage in your writing process, however, they will often work best once you have created a thesis statement. The outline will be used as a template in order to piece the essay together. If you put work into a good outline, the essay itself will be fairly easy. There are definitely important steps that come before making an outline, but often an outline can help you with those steps too! Sometimes students have difficulty creating a working thesis statement. Do you fall into that category? Well, sometimes it can be hard because you don’t know exactly what you want to say yet. After all, why are you going to limit yourself on what you are going to argue? So, start by picking out things you like and fill in an outline, then, from those things (whatever your main topics end up being), you can figure out what your argument would be. That way you can really map out what you want to say, where you want to say it, and how you want to address it before you put it on paper. However, there are things that you HAVE to know before you create your outline.
- What is your audience? How you talk about your topic will be greatly affected by your audience. Is it a formal audience? Your friends? Are you writing for a blog or for a research paper? Understanding your audience will allow you to create a tone through your outline.
- What is the goal of the essay? You have a prompt of some sort. What are you writing the essay for? Are you promoting something? Are you arguing about something? Are you analyzing or reporting? You need to know what type of points to pick out for your outline, so understanding the overall goal of the paper is essential.
How do you plan out your essay?
- Choose a topic. (you can pick a broad topic at this point, but after you fill out the outline it will narrow itself down. Or, you can visit this guides chapter titled How to Plan and Essay for more information on how to do this.). While you do this you are going to want to determine the larger purpose of what you are going to say. What is the actual point you are trying to get across? Make sure you have a topic.
- Decide on your main goal. Persuasion? Information? Personal Reflection? You need to figure out how you want to approach the essay).
- Gather supporting materials. Write down subtopics, quotes, statistics, and ideas. Remember to note the page number so that you can easily cite the information later.
- Choose a type of outline.
- Organize your main points, then add your talking points for each of those main points, and then add supporting content like pictures, quotations, and so forth.
- Review and adjust: MANY PEOPLE DON’T THINK YOU CAN ADJUST YOUR OUTLINE. You need to remember an outline is a guide for your essay. It is much like a grocery list. You are going to the store with this list so you remember what you have to pick up. You’re walking down an isle and you see this awesome new pop-tart flavor you want to try, so you pick that up too. It wasn’t on your list, but you have the freedom of adding things and taking things out whenever you want. An outline is just a tool to help you write your essay with ease [1].
To put it blatantly, there is no guide to every type of outline. It would be an impossible task. Since outlines are so personalized and almost always catered to each specific prompt, there is no way to pinpoint every type. However, there are some more basic outline formats that are generally worked from.
Research Essay Outline
Most students will have plenty of experience with research essays. These essays will consist of an individual doing some research on a topic, taking some type of stance or asking a question pertaining to the overall topic, and then using the research done to answer their question/support their stance. These outlines are basic in the sense they only require three different steps. First, you fill out your Introduction. In this part of the outline you will want to identify your main essay question, your thesis, and your main talking points. Its general, but crucial. Then you fill out your body. Take whatever main points you identified previously and expand on them using whatever research you have done. You will need to cite your sources in these paragraphs, so it can be useful to write down the quote with its citation in this part of the outline so you know exactly where you want to use it. Lastly, you fill out your conclusion. This will be a reiteration of the previous. Make notes to yourself to go back and mention your thesis/ research question. Also, it may be useful to acknowledge the other side if you are researching something with polar sides.
Literature Outline
Literature outlines are useful whenever you need to write a literary analysis of a story. This outline urges you to break up the literature you are working with into a format that is more functional. For example, maybe you are analyzing a play and need to dissect it scene by scene. Maybe you want to organize your essay in terms of different symbols or by plot-line. The deal with this is that each paragraph you are going to be writing basically has its own section for outlining. This can get pretty intensive, however for literary essays where there can be so many possible interpretations of one thing, this works very well.
Science Outline
This extensive guide offers many sections explaining different types of science-writing. Visit those pages to see the different elements of the assignment to help you break down what is required.
My Personal Method
As I have previously mentioned, the number of outline types are endless. My personal method is a perfect example of that. I started by using the general formats for outlines, but I grew into my own method that I now use for every type of assignment. Often times in tutoring appointments I will show writers this set up, and they tend to enjoy it very much. So, I will break my method down here.
If the pictures confuse you, let me explain further. You are going to want an Introduction and a Conclusion; that is customary across MOST disciplines (if this isn’t necessary for your essay, skip this step). If you do need those elements, then leave yourself a few notes in those sections. What is your thesis? What are the main points of the essay?
The next thing you should do is separate your arguments by main points. These are going to be subheadings.With these, you can name the main point, write a basic topic sentence, and then write whatever basic support you have for that. I also have devised a system where I will put the quotation, or a number indicating a quotation, near that point so I know exactly what to include when I write. So lets look at an outline I posted which I actually used in a class:
The assignment I was given was to read a short story and then talk about the various symbols I noticed. My thesis stated several different points that I wished to talk about, and I broke those things up into my main points. Those include: Chrysanthemums, Mannishness (masculinity), clothes, Salinas Valley, fences, pets, technology, and dogs. It is important to note that your main points are NOT paragraphs. In fact, they will probably end up being 1 to 4 paragraphs long (depending on detail) but they are used to show a break down of your ideas and enforce a type of organization. It helps you keep like ideas together. You want to title that. Make sure where you say “point one” it also says what your point one is. Then under that make your bulleted list of talking points. What are you planning on saying in terms of that point? Feel free to create sections and subsections branching off of this, as this is going to demonstrate how the paragraph will flow. It allows you to plan out the important things so you don’t forget anything, and so it all makes sense.
As I have previously mentioned, I devised a system so that I can easily incorporate quotations into my outline. I prefer to have physical copies of what I am taking quotations from, so I usually print out whatever articles I am referencing. Then I annotate those documents like crazy, and whenever I see a quote I really want to put in my essay, I will highlight it and number it. Then, as I am drafting up my outline I will put the number from my document next to a point I want to explain. That shows me that when I start to talk about that point I have a quote to back up my statement. However, you can always just list the quotation directly in the outline and that would work just as well. Or, you can type up a separate document which holds all your quotations so that you don’t have to print out every article, just that sheet.
All-in-all, this outline format basically writes my essay for me. Everything I need is listed in the outline, and I just follow it as I go along. As I move through some things need to be taken out or moved, but my options are there.
Post-Writing Outlines
There is another type of outline that you should know about, and it is more of an after-the-fact measure. Instead of using this type of outline in pre-writing, this outline would be useful post-writing. In many of my tutoring appointments writers use this outline to dissect the work they’ve already done, and it allows them to address issues they didn’t originally notice.
Lets talk about math for a second. Let’s say you’re doing a very difficult problem for your math class. What is the one thing your professors always tell you to do? Check your work. So, think of reverse outlines as the check-your-work method of the writing world. So how does it work? You will be taking away all the supporting writing of your essay, and working with the main points, and then, from that, it may help you put it back together more effectively.
Reverse outlines can help you:
- Determine if your paper meets its goal. Does your essay do what it is supposed to do?
- Discover places to expand on your evidence. Are you too vague? Can you explain yourself more effectively?
- See where readers may be confused by your organization and structure.
- Help you develop your arguments.
- Take the essay apart, identify its flaws, and then reorganize it to communicate your points better [2].
When would you want to use a reverse outline?
- Maybe you just finished an essay. Maybe this essay was very important. You read over it several times, and you’ve had all your friends read it over too. You want more reassurance? Break it apart. Evaluate the essay from its base [3].
- You hit a dead end while writing. You didn’t make an outline before you started writing, or maybe you did and you went a little too off track. You are stuck. Take a step back before you continue writing and break apart what you did. Where did the flow of thought go wrong? What can you add in?
So just how do you do it? Well, there are just two steps. However, you have some options [4].
- Start with a complete draft. You are going to want to start with a complete draft because you need to reverse what you did. However, if you are stuck in the middle of an essay, it would also be appropriate to stop there and take a break. Make a reverse outline to figure out how to fix the mistake before the essay goes off track too much.
- Construct the outline. This is where you have some options. Obviously, as we have discussed, an outline is supposed to meet your needs. So it may be useful to determine your purpose for the essay and then figure out how you want to approach taking it apart.
The Topic Sentence Way:
- Your paragraphs should all have topic sentences. And, hopefully, those topic sentences give an adequate overview of your argument within that paragraph. Copy and paste the topic sentences from each of the paragraphs into a separate document. Look at the progression of your ideas. Do they flow? Are they organized effectively? If not, perhaps consider reorganizing your paragraph order, or, locate the paragraph that started to decline in your essays effectiveness.
The One-Sentence Summary Way:
- This is a good outline in the case that your topic sentences don’t explain the paragraph’s purpose. Instead, follow the same idea, just write one sentence that explains the paragraph.
Of course, these are only suggestions. You can pretty much use any outline and just fit the pieces in. What I find works the best is to make two outlines. Make an outline showing exactly what you have done, and then based off that, make a new outline to show what you want to fix or change, and then edit your essay as such.
Then, after you do this, there may be some questions you ask yourself to evaluate what you’ve done. They go as follows:
- Does every paragraph relate back to your main idea?
- Where might a reader have trouble following the order of your ideas? (it’s a good way to review your organization).
- Do several of your paragraphs repeat one idea?
- Are your paragraphs too long? Too short?
- "How to Write an Outline,” WikiHow, accessed November 18, 2015, http://www.wikihow.com/Write-an-Outline. ↵
- “Reverse Outlines: A Writer’s Technique for Examining Organization,” The Writer's Handbook, accessed November 18, 2015, https://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/ReverseOutlines.html. ↵
- "Reverse Outlines: A Writer’s Technique for Examining Organization" ↵
- "Reverse Outlines: A Writer’s Technique for Examining Organization." ↵