Experienced writers differ considerably in the ways they go about organizing ideas and information, so experiment until you find a method that works well for you.

Subject grouping

You may find it useful to have physical notes to arrange—note cards or sticky notes, for example, or printouts of your slides or of notes you have been keeping online that you mark in some way to make the subject categories easy to identify. You can group the pieces around subject headings and reorder the parts until they seem to make sense.

Grouping your notes will help you see how well you can support your thesis and if you have missed any essential points. Do you need to omit any ideas or sources? Do you need to find additional evidence for a main or supporting point? Once you have gathered everything together and organized your materials, you can see how the many small pieces of your research fit together. Make sure that your evidence supports your explicit thesis; if not, you may need to revise it or do additional research—or both.

Once you have established initial groups, skim through the notes and look for ways to organize your draft. Figure out what background your audience needs, what points you need to make first, how much detail and support to offer for each point, and so on.

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Outline

You can use outlines in various ways and at various stages. Some writers group their notes, write a draft, and then outline the draft to study its tentative structure. Others develop an informal working outline from their notes and revise it as they go along. Still other writers prefer to plot out their organization early on in a formal outline.

First-year writing student David Craig drew up a working outline of his ideas while he was still doing research on his topic, thinking that this simple structure would help him focus on the information he still needed to find. Here is his informal outline:

Decline of youth literacy

Lower test scores, other proof (statistics)

How instant messaging fits in, examples from critics

My research

Can I show that IM is a language?

How widespread is it?

Comments from linguists—tie-in to IM language

What is the real cause of declining youth literacy?

Because he knew he was required to submit a formal outline with his essay, David Craig kept revising this informal outline as his research and writing progressed. He did not complete his formal outline until after his essay was drafted. At that point, the formal outline helped him analyze and revise the draft.

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