Creating An Effective Outline For A Descriptive Essay

An outline will always remain an integral part of writing projects, especially when it comes to academic papers like a descriptive essay. Whether the paper you are to write is short or long, it is important that you create an outline for it since it will go a long way in helping you define the structure of the paper you are working on. It will also help you get a better idea of where you are headed with your academic paper. As interesting as this may sound, most students still find it difficult to successfully create outlines for their various essays. If your outline does not impact on your paper, then it is not effective.

If you wish learn how to create an effective outline for your paper and in turn, save yourself a lot of trouble that is associated with writing a descriptive essay without any direction, here are the things you need to know. They are as follows:

• See It As A Guide: For students who usually create outlines before they start writing essays and yet fail to make headways, there is definitely something you are not getting right. You are seeing an outline as a draft which it is not. You should only see it as a structural guide for writing your paper and needs to look as scanty as a ‘skeleton’. You can then gradually begin to give it ‘flesh’ when you start the actual writing of the academic paper.
• Make It Short: Making your paper’s outline short means that when you start writing, you will go straight to the point instead of adding fluff and filler to the content of your paper. Keeping it short also helps you to quickly understand if the content of your paper need to be expanded and on which areas.
• It Should Be Flexible: An effective outline for a descriptive essay is one which is flexible. This means that there is room for changes to be made to the content of the paper as soon as the writing exercise starts. In the course of writing, you will find out that certain paragraphs contribute little or nothing to the paper and as such, there is the need for such chapters to be removed. Create your outline in a way that this type of change can be made without disrupting the workflow.

Now you can see that the effectiveness of an outline does not lie in how extensive it is but on how concise it is. Therefore, you should rather stick to a short outline that makes writing your descriptive essay less stressful than a long outline that makes your paper look like the joke of the century.