The importance of creating an outline for an essay

Keeping yourself organized

You probably have quite a lot of knowledge or research that you’re bringing to this project. And you likely know that your essay needs a beginning, middle and end—or more precisely, an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. What an outline can do for you is to help you figure out the order of concepts or information. Why is this important?

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• It helps mitigate fear and writer’s block. It’s definitely easier to talk yourself into outlining an essay than expecting yourself to sit down and write it all at once. Writing an essay outline is literally a plan of attack and seeing what you have to do next can help you approach your essay in bite-sized, manageable chunks. This is great if you don’t have a lot of writing time or if you need to step in and out of working on your essay—your outline will keep all your ideas fresh and patiently waiting for you to return to them.
• It can help you draft the essay. By arranging your thoughts beforehand, you can be inspired to start writing—and write faster overall. Rather than having to imagine and be inspired on the spot, you’re just following your steps and filling in the gaps versus jumping in wherever.
• It allows you to see new connections between information. When you sit down and plan a structure, you might be surprised by ideas that suddenly take on a whole new meaning now that you’ve considered how to best present them.
• It helps you stay on topic. You’re less likely to go off on a tangent when your conceptual road map has your next few turns laid out for you.

Another great thing about doing an outline before writing a whole essay is that it’s a lot easier to be flexible in an outline than after several pages of writing. You’re less likely to realize you missed a point and have go back and insert it or rearrange several whole pages of writing and find new ways to reconnect them. With an essay outline, you have room to make mistakes and experiment before diving in, which can save you time and stress.

Structuring your structure

You can make your essay outline as basic or as detailed as you need—this is your outline for your writing, and different projects might require a different level of planning. For instance, if you know you’re going to need to offer several examples or statistics, you can have an overall topic heading and then list places for:

• Example A
• Example B
• Example C

You can also use your essay outline as a notetaking template even earlier in the process or as a tool to help you brainstorm. If you have an idea of the essay’s overall structure or a section’s topic, you can write it down and then write down relevant information as you discover in your research. Then, you can go back and assemble each section individually, and watch the entire essay begin to take shape.

Perhaps the most important part of your essay is your thesis, or the entire idea your essay is communicating. All your supporting points and information can spring from your desire to prove or flesh out your thesis. Your thesis is a key part of your introduction, so figuring will help the beginning of your essay take shape in addition to the rest of the piece.

Then, after your supporting points are created, you can also use your essay outline to highlight moments for transition. With the information in front of you, you can see what’s missing or how one idea naturally leads to the next. Before you know it, you’ll have an entire essay laid out in front of you. If you write your essay in chronological order, by the time you reach your conclusion, you should have no trouble restating your case and driving your point home.

Hopefully this was a convincing argument for outlining essays. So, what are you waiting for? Get outlining so you can get to writing!