Outlining
Having a good plan before starting to draft has its benefits. The ideas and direction gained through the planning can be plotted out in a well structured outline. Experience from essay teaching in the English Unit at LU shows that students who work with an outline generally perform much better than students who do not invest energy into the last stage of planning. Early planning such as working on an outline is a good place to start for any type of writing.
Outlining can help in
- working out how to answer the question
- deciding which material is appropriate
- structuring the text
- providing supervisors/tutors/teachers an insight to the essay, enabling them to sort out any possible problems that could arise later on.
The following link will guide you through the stages in the outline planning. It starts with a brief outline about essay plans and outlines then by paging forward, guides you through the provisional stage, to the elaborated stage and after further thinking and planning, guides you through the further development stage of outline planning.Just like the whole AWELU writing process section, this link is mainly intended for undergraduate students. However, undergraduate students are likely to be able to get much help and useful information there.