The process of writing an excellent essay outline is an invaluable skill for any student and scholar in general. A perfect research paper outline is a prerequisite for a quality writing assignment. The role that it plays in ensuring that a research paper is comprehensive and coherent cannot be overemphasized.
A research paper outline is the skeletal system of your research paper. It defines its scope and ensures there is perfect flow and coherency. Moreso, an excellent outline helps you cross-check the essay draft’s content relative to your assignment’s rubric to ensure that you have covered all the requirements.
Once you have set your essay outline right, the rest of the body falls into place easily. Nonetheless, writing an excellent research paper outline might be challenging for most people. The following is a guide that you might follow to develop an excellent term paper outline.
How to Formulate a Perfect Essay Outline
Understand the academic paper you are working on
Foremost, formulate an essay topic and a thesis statement for the same. Afterward, determine the type of paper you are working on. Despite having the same general structure, you might need to adjust the outline to fit the type of paper you are working on. For instance, an argumentative essay might have a somewhat different structure from a poetry analysis or an article critique paper.
The type of paper you will be working on is often highlighted in your assignment instructions. You definitely have seen ‘write a reflection essay on…’, ‘write a term paper on…’, or ‘write a personal statement on…’ Such statements are what you should be looking for in your essay instructions to understand the type of paper you are working on.
Determine the format of your essay outline
The second thing you need to consider is the outline format you want for your essay assignment. The choice of the outline format might be determined by various factors, such as the instructor’s instructions, the purpose of the outline, the thesis statement, or the essay’s audience. Check Purdue’s guidelines on the various types of outlines and their examples.
Develop a draft essay outline
It is commendable to develop a rough draft of the research paper outline you intend to formulate after doing preliminary research on your research topic. You can never go wrong by doing preliminary research for your essay outline, as it gives you ideas on your topic and a general overview of how to structure your college essay. It helps create a visual picture of your outline’s structure.
Perfect your draft essay outline
At this juncture, you need to do in-depth research after which you extensively structure the essay outline by identifying major ideas and their supporting facts from previous literature. In general, your article paper outline should look something similar to:
Structure of a Perfect Essay Outline
Introduction
- Attention catching sentence to the readers
- Background information on your essay topic
- Thesis statement
Body
- Topic sentence 1
- Supporting evidence 1
- Supporting evidence 2 …
- Topic sentence 2
- Supporting evidence 1
- Supporting evidence 2 …
Conclusion
- Restate the thesis statement
- Highlight major findings
- Insightful closing sentence
The structure of your term paper outline should be comprehensive and coherent. The ideas it captures for any given section and paragraph need to connect while writing the final essay paper. The outline should also be structured in a manner that is relative to the page requirements for your assignment. You do not want to end up with a shorter or longer essay all because you messed up while writing your essay outline!
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