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How to Write an Outline for an Essay Properly, Following the Main Requirements


Writing effectively is a vital skill to develop, and in many cases that means writing academic essays. Especially as the amount of content grows larger, school papers become incrementally harder and harder to write. For a paper of any sizable length, the only way to go about it is outlining. This makes the project manageable, and provides a skeleton from which you can fill out the details of your essay. They also help to prevent writer's block- what you should write next are already on your outline. Outlines are also needed to present your ideas in any kind of organized manner.

Note that sometimes, especially in academic settings, a specific format for an essay will be required- such as if you are writing in MLA or APA format. Whenever this occurs, the outline is likely to be for an assignment, and you can trust that your instructor will properly explain what format they want the essay in. In this case, just trust in your instructor- but when you are not given specific instructions, there are some rules you can follow.

The big thing is to keep your essay as simple as possible. The principle is that you have indentations a list of items, with indented sub lists below those items. For example, on the first level, you have your main ideas; more often than not, your paragraphs get one section at the top level of the outline. You may want to create groupings of paragraphs, particularly for long papers, if they start to breach 10+ pages. Introductions and conclusions are unique, because you should do specific thing like include a thesis statement or summaries of your essay.

From here, you will want to state each of your main ideas - things that can be expressed in about a paragraph. From here, you will want in indent and list all of the relevant sub points. Below each sub point, you should list supporting facts, and if you are doing a research paper you should add any citations, facts, and notes, sourced where you got them. You will also want to include any quotations that you want to use so you do not have to look them up later. Note that at each level of indentation the format also changes a bit- often what you see is roman numerals for the paragraphs, numbers for the points of each paragraph, and lowercase letters for supporting facts and quotes.

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