When you start a new project with Essay, you’ll often benefit from starting with Outline.
Creating an outline is often the most difficult part of writing an essay, and it’s not optional. The outline of an essay is like the skeleton of a body. It provides the fundamental form and structure of your argument or story.
Use Outline to map out the ideas, arguments, or topics you wish to explore. Having an outline keeps you engaged in your topic, and keeps the content of your piece ordered and organized while you write.
A thousand-word essay requires a ten sentence outline. However, an outline should not get much longer than 15 sentences, even if the essay is several thousand words or more in length. This is because it is difficult to keep an argument of that length in your mind at one time to assess the quality of its structure.
With Outline, you can rearrange you topics and paragraphs, ensuring that your work flows at every level of analysis.
Create your Outline Topics
Make your way to Outline in your Essay Workspace.
Begin by clicking the “Create outline topic” button and write a topic sentence.
keyboard shortcut: Cmd/Ctrl + Option/Alt + O
These sentences are not actually part of your essay. Rather, you create them to guide you in your writing and to structure your work. Your outline topics should clearly indicate what you are going to write about in each section.
You can also create an outline topic by converting a paragraph or heading in the Essay editor into an outline topic by highlighting the text, clicking on the “Convert to” button, and selecting “Outline Topic”.
Or by pressing the plus button on a new line of text and clicking Outline Topic.
Once you have created some outline topics, you can expand upon your outline by writing down the major points you’d like to cover in that section.
Experiment with the order of your outline topics by dragging and dropping them into place.
The drag indicator makes it easy to move outline topics around.
Once you have your outline in place, it’s time to write! Head to Produce to write your first draft.
Reordering your sentences and paragraphs
Before you have finished your essay, come back to Outline to reassess the structure and order of your arguments to make sure they flow well.
It may well be that by now in the editing process, you will find that the order of the outline topics from your original outline are no longer precisely appropriate and that some reordering of those sections is called for.
You can “expand all” outline topics to view all your writing; or you can “collapse all” outline topics to just view the outline of your Essay
Reorganize your paragraphs and sections by dragging and dropping them into place.
Evaluate the ordering of your paragraphs and outline sections to ensure your argument(s) flow smoothly and coherently.
You can drag and drop paragraphs within a section or to a different section.
Read our full writing guide for more information about how to create an outline and structure your essay.