Getting an essay assignment during your academic career may look like easy pickings at first, but as you progress through your academic life the essay topics get more and more complicated. This is because as you’re getting mature along with your education, you’re required to provide insights on more though provoking topics and provide reasonable arguments to support your point of view.

To be able to properly argue over a topic in an essay, you need to choose a topic that you are wholly familiar with. This will help you to write at great length over a topic and provide reasonable arguments and conclusions. To get a good idea rolling, you’ll need to organize all the basic ideas that your essay will contain. This is where an ideas outline comes in.

You can use an outline to put your ideas about a particular essay topic on paper. It helps you to organize the ideas which you will finally incorporate into the essay. Of course, the ideas presented in your outline may vary somewhat from your completed essay, but that is to be expected as your essay will go through different fact-checks in order to be complete.

Decide whether you prefer the cut-and-dried structure of an outline or a more flowing structure. If you start one or the other and decide it isn't working for you, you can always switch later.

• Start off your outline by writing your topic title at the top of the page.

• Numerate 3 quarters of your page. This will create adequate space for you to write down your ideas as mentioned below.

• Do make sure that another page is along the side of this page as well. We’ll explain why later.

• Jot down the main ideas that you have about your topic against each number, or the central points that you want to examine. Here’s how you should proceed:

• If you’re being persuasive, write down your best arguments.

• If you’re explaining a process, write the steps that should be followed.

• If you’re being informative, write down the major categories into which your information can be divided.

Now that page 1 is done, we’ll get to the other page that we asked you to keep right next to page 1. Here’s what you need to do with page 2:

• Next to each number that you entered in step 2, write A, B, and C on the second page.

• Next to each main idea, write the important facts or information that support your main idea.

When you’re done, the basic structure for your essay is now complete and you should have no problem in proceeding.