Outlines

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Study Skill 8.3 Outlines

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Introduction

Whether you are struggling with too many ideas or having a hard time coming up with enough ideas or supporting details, outlining can help.  When you use an outline you can quickly and easily sort out all of the information that you want to include in your essay in a way that is easy to read and makes sense to you.  You can think about it as creating a skeleton for your essay because your outline will determine the structure and position of all of your ideas.  Then, when you go to write your essay, all you need to do is “flesh out” the ideas,  using complete sentences and transitions.  To continue the skeleton analogy, this would be like adding muscles, organs, and skin.  Either way, an outline helps bring your ideas to life!

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Key Ideas

  • Decide on your topic and determine the purpose or thesis of your essay
  • Brainstorm supporting points, coming up with as many relevant ideas for your essay as possible.
  • Organize your ideas into groupings that make sense
  • Create an outline, using the main idea for each paragraph as section headers, with supporting points as subsections.

Apply

  • Take a list of unorganized points and figure out how you would organize them into an effective outline.  Visit https://goo.gl/CE9tzv Links to an external site. for an example
  • As a class, create a thesis on any topic that is really important or interesting to you as students.  Then, together brainstorm as many relevant ideas as possible.  Write all of these ideas up on the board.  Work together to group these ideas into categories that makes sense.  Decide which ideas are main ideas and which are sub-points or sub-sections.  Pick an order that will work best and create an organized outline together.