ENGL 101 East Tennessee State The Grand Challenge of Ending Homelessness Essay

Read This: Making an Outline

Some of us begin our papers by trying to compose a good first sentence. Then we proceed to write by stringing sentences together, one after another, until we feel tired or until we reach some assigned word limit. While this may work sometimes, more often it leads to poor writing, bad grades, and frustrated writers.

What is missing in your process? How do good writers do it?

Most good writers don’t start writing sentences until they have a good sense of what points they plan to include, what order those points should come in, how they plan to illustrate those points, and how they will introduce and conclude their ideas. In short, they outline.

An outline for a writer is like an itinerary for a traveler. Writers use outlines to tell them where they are going and what they are planning to do along the way.

Here are some other things that outlines do for writers:

1) organize and plot the writer’s ideas

2) clarify weak or missing ideas

3) give the writer a sense of the length of the writing

4) help the writer see balance (or lack of balance)

5) allow the writer to work non-sequentially (that is, out of order, here and there)

6) reduce a writer’s stress by breaking the job down into small parts

For these reasons, the outline is one of the most powerful tools that writers have. People who struggle with writing should pay special attention to this step. If they do, they will find that many of their fears and frustrations can be dissolved.

See the Example attached below for an idea of what your final draft should look like.finish