Use this outlining template to fill in all the parts of your essay before you begin writing your rough draft.
A few points to remember:
- This template is NOT an exact structure for your paper. You might not have THREE stages—-you could have four. Also, sometimes you can dedicate more than one middle paragraph to a particular stage, when more elaboration is needed, so their number might vary as well.
- Sometimes one of your middle paragraphs might not correspond to a stage in your argument. You might include a paragraph acknowledging a counter-argument to your thesis. But you will not include this counter-argument in your preview in the beginning section.
- When you fill in this outline template, abbreviate the CONTENT of what you actually plan to write in your paragraphs; each part of this outline should be in your paper.
The Writing Stage
Use this paper template to start your rough draft. All the MLA formatting you'll need is already set up.
For some, writing the paper is the easiest stage of all, but for others it is the most intimidating. Here are some pointers to help you compose your paper with less stress:
- Write in your natural voice instead of forcing yourself into "essay" mode and trying to sound smart. If your natural voice leads to grammatical errors, you can deal with them during the editing stage.
- Use your outline as a guide for writing your paragraphs. Free yourself from holding all of your ideas in your head at once by referring to the ideas you have already laid out in your outline. If you feel more comfortable writing your draft before you compose your outline, you should write your draft first. But then come back and write an outline afterward and make adjustments to your draft if you discover gaps or find that your ideas need to be in a different order.
- Try not to overwhelm yourself with grammatical concerns at this stage. Over-monitoring yourself can lead to a robotic style of writing, which will be more harmful to your paper in the long run than grammar errors, which you can fix later on anyway.
- Focus on writing complete paragraphs and making your paragraphs connect to each other logically.
