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Writing Outlines for Essays and Reports
Writing outlines before you start writing your essays is always a helpful habit. A well written draft of an essay or report should have some "prewriting." Skillful prewriting includes research on your topic’s main idea, planning it out and organizing well before writing a rough draft for your essays. Narrowing your topic is important before you start off your prewriting. If you already have a topic assigned, skip this step. Keep noting down the short pointers that come to you when doing research and brainstorming. You may choose one of the two approaches: either use short jotted down statements and expand on them later on or write complete sentences when writing outlines. The first approach is obviously simpler but the second approach leads to a faster forming of an essay, since all you need is already there, almost.
What are Outlines? Writing outlines simply means listing the important pointers you are going to use and expand on in your essay. It is like a skeleton of your final copy. Remember, your outline is just that. It is not your first draft so don’t bother too much about the length. A single page of outlining is okay in most cases. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing outlines is best organized by using bulleted ( • ) or numbered lists. The usual form is to label the main ideas with Roman Numerals ( I, II, III, IV, and so on.) If you want to write on another, less important idea, under one of the Roman numerals, use capital English letters like A, B, C and D. Under the capital letters use the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. If you are making a very detailed outline for a very long report, the next level down is lower case letters (a, b, c, etc.) To be logical if you have an "A" in your paper, you need to have a "B"; a "1" requires a "2," and so on. An outline page organized this way may look something like; Please note that the bullets ( • ) aren't really needed on the outline form above, I just used them to keep from being confused. How to Write an Outline for Essays and Reports? The sample given here uses five paragraphs for outlining. The number you will use depends on the number of body paragraphs you want in your essay. An essay essentially has the following parts: An introduction (I), a body (II, and maybe others) and a conclusion (the last Roman Numeral.) Outlining the introduction comes first. This basically means having a clearly written thesis or topic statement. A thesis statement is the central idea of your essay. In the Introduction you may also want to include the central ideas of the body paragraphs which will follow the introduction in the essay. Next, you need to outline the body paragraphs. If you have three paragraphs in the essay body, you have three outline numerals. Each paragraph should have: Finally, you come to outlining the conclusion paragraph. It is a statement or two which you can expand later on and which gives a closing end to the essay. Your concluding paragraph will re-state the original introduction idea. Also, this part will present a summary of the body paragraphs. Method or Approach: Don’t look at writing outlines as the final step in your reports. Rather, treat it like a concrete foundation or base for the final building, i.e. your essay. You will use it to help create your first complete essay copy. You will notice that your writing improves by leaps and bounds once you start writing outlines before writing the actual essays or reports.
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