Writing a research paper outline - key guidelines

You have just been tasked with writing your first research paper, and you have just figured that you don’t know how to write a proper research paper outline, or you are simply interested in knowing how to write an outline of a research paper; whatever might your need or interest be, if you want to learn about writing a research paper outline, then you have come to the right place because that is exactly what we are discussing here.

Writing an outline for a research paper or any other kind of essay is more of a help for the writer rather than being a necessity. Even if it is not a requirement, an efficient essay writer would know that writing an outline for your essay or your paper will help you organize your work and will be an immense help in structuring it according to your needs. An outline provides a logical sequence in which you can write your essay. It will help you in listing your arguments in a manner in which it will convey sense to your reader and will explain the central theme of your essay from beginning to the end. An outline is basically a more summarized and confined version of your paper. It includes the thesis statement of your paper, a summarized version of the topic sentences of each paragraph or key ideas discussed in each paragraph and the evidence of the claims that you have stated.

An outline provides the visualization of your essay. Apparently, different college papers for the types of essays have five or more paragraphs. Papers longer than this can have different variations. However, if you are familiar with writing a 5-paragraph essay, that should make it easy for you to write longer pieces containing more paragraphs. Coming specifically to writing an outline of a research paper, there are certain steps that should be followed. For example, if you are writing an essay for your college then it usually consists of five paragraphs, and it can easily be an essay which is descriptive or argumentative in nature. Secondly, it should determine what your topic is. As it happens, topics are usually assigned by your supervisor. If you are unsure about what the most appropriate topics of an essay can be which can entice your reader to read your paper then you can take help from any essay writing service online which can help you with it. However, this guide can also help you getting started so you have both the options to explore. Generally, essay topics are arguable in nature.

When I write my paper, I make sure to thoroughly think about creating my outline in terms of writing my paper. There are three primary parts that are included in every research paper. The introduction, body paragraphs and the conclusion. The entire research paper is encapsulated in these three parts. In a similar manner, you should write your research paper outline as well. Start off by giving the heading of introduction and make sure to make bullet points of the content that follows in this heading. After this, you need to mention the headings of the content of the introduction such as problem statement, methodology, research type and hypothesis etc. This pattern has to be followed in each section which corresponds to the structure of your research paper. In the subsequent sections to follow, a similar pattern must be applied.

The next major heading would be of the body paragraphs under which you will list the heading of each of your body paragraphs which constitutes your essay’s main arguments. Since the outline of a research paper is naturally written before the main content of the paper, therefore dividing your content in different headings and sub-categories will help you in streamlining your content and it will also help you in deciding that which content or heading needs to be mentioned first, what content is necessary and what needs to be omitted from the paper. This is one of the primary purposes of a research paper outline. In the conclusion part of your outline, the heading of conclusion is given on the similar pattern as the previous two major headings which include the subheadings. The subheadings of the conclusion part will be related to the concluding arguments of the essay which summarizes the entire paper and reinstates the main arguments as well as the thesis statement of it that is included in the beginning in the introduction paragraph.

That’s about it. This is one way of writing a research paper outline. There can be variations in writing an outline of a research paper, but in essence, the structure of the outline of a research paper must follow a pattern which reflects the content of the essay. It is important to note that no major argument of the essay should be ignored when writing your outline. In hindsight, an outline of a research paper or any other similar piece of writing must be able to give the reader the best possible understanding of what the paper is about. Failing to do so will fail the purpose of writing an outline. In academic practice, an outline of a research paper is used by supervisors or instructors in order to have an idea of the content of the research paper.