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9.3 Organizing Your Writing

Learning objectives.

Understand how and why organizational techniques help writers and readers stay focused.
Assess how and when to use chronological order to organize an essay.
Recognize how and when to use order of importance to organize an essay.
Determine how and when to use spatial order to organize an essay.

The method of organization you choose for your essay is just as important as its content. Without a clear organizational pattern, your reader could become confused and lose interest. The way you structure your essay helps your readers draw connections between the body and the thesis, and the structure also keeps you focused as you plan and write the essay. Choosing your organizational pattern before you outline ensures that each body paragraph works to support and develop your thesis.

This section covers three ways to organize body paragraphs:

Chronological order
Order of importance
Spatial order

When you begin to draft your essay, your ideas may seem to flow from your mind in a seemingly random manner. Your readers, who bring to the table different backgrounds, viewpoints, and ideas, need you to clearly organize these ideas in order to help process and accept them.

A solid organizational pattern gives your ideas a path that you can follow as you develop your draft. Knowing how you will organize your paragraphs allows you to better express and analyze your thoughts. Planning the structure of your essay before you choose supporting evidence helps you conduct more effective and targeted research.

Chronological Order

In Chapter 8 “The Writing Process: How Do I Begin?” , you learned that chronological arrangement has the following purposes:

To explain the history of an event or a topic
To tell a story or relate an experience
To explain how to do or to make something
To explain the steps in a process

Chronological order is mostly used in expository writing , which is a form of writing that narrates, describes, informs, or explains a process. When using chronological order, arrange the events in the order that they actually happened, or will happen if you are giving instructions. This method requires you to use words such as first , second , then , after that , later , and finally . These transition words guide you and your reader through the paper as you expand your thesis.

For example, if you are writing an essay about the history of the airline industry, you would begin with its conception and detail the essential timeline events up until present day. You would follow the chain of events using words such as first , then , next , and so on.

Writing at Work

At some point in your career you may have to file a complaint with your human resources department. Using chronological order is a useful tool in describing the events that led up to your filing the grievance. You would logically lay out the events in the order that they occurred using the key transition words. The more logical your complaint, the more likely you will be well received and helped.

Choose an accomplishment you have achieved in your life. The important moment could be in sports, schooling, or extracurricular activities. On your own sheet of paper, list the steps you took to reach your goal. Try to be as specific as possible with the steps you took. Pay attention to using transition words to focus your writing.

Keep in mind that chronological order is most appropriate for the following purposes:

Writing essays containing heavy research
Writing essays with the aim of listing, explaining, or narrating
Writing essays that analyze literary works such as poems, plays, or books

When using chronological order, your introduction should indicate the information you will cover and in what order, and the introduction should also establish the relevance of the information. Your body paragraphs should then provide clear divisions or steps in chronology. You can divide your paragraphs by time (such as decades, wars, or other historical events) or by the same structure of the work you are examining (such as a line-by-line explication of a poem).

On a separate sheet of paper, write a paragraph that describes a process you are familiar with and can do well. Assume that your reader is unfamiliar with the procedure. Remember to use the chronological key words, such as first , second , then , and finally .

Order of Importance

Recall from Chapter 8 “The Writing Process: How Do I Begin?” that order of importance is best used for the following purposes:

Persuading and convincing
Ranking items by their importance, benefit, or significance
Illustrating a situation, problem, or solution

Most essays move from the least to the most important point, and the paragraphs are arranged in an effort to build the essay’s strength. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to begin with your most important supporting point, such as in an essay that contains a thesis that is highly debatable. When writing a persuasive essay, it is best to begin with the most important point because it immediately captivates your readers and compels them to continue reading.

For example, if you were supporting your thesis that homework is detrimental to the education of high school students, you would want to present your most convincing argument first, and then move on to the less important points for your case.

Some key transitional words you should use with this method of organization are most importantly , almost as importantly , just as importantly , and finally .

During your career, you may be required to work on a team that devises a strategy for a specific goal of your company, such as increasing profits. When planning your strategy you should organize your steps in order of importance. This demonstrates the ability to prioritize and plan. Using the order of importance technique also shows that you can create a resolution with logical steps for accomplishing a common goal.

On a separate sheet of paper, write a paragraph that discusses a passion of yours. Your passion could be music, a particular sport, filmmaking, and so on. Your paragraph should be built upon the reasons why you feel so strongly. Briefly discuss your reasons in the order of least to greatest importance.

Spatial Order

As stated in Chapter 8 “The Writing Process: How Do I Begin?” , spatial order is best used for the following purposes:

Helping readers visualize something as you want them to see it
Evoking a scene using the senses (sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound)
Writing a descriptive essay

Spatial order means that you explain or describe objects as they are arranged around you in your space, for example in a bedroom. As the writer, you create a picture for your reader, and their perspective is the viewpoint from which you describe what is around you.

The view must move in an orderly, logical progression, giving the reader clear directional signals to follow from place to place. The key to using this method is to choose a specific starting point and then guide the reader to follow your eye as it moves in an orderly trajectory from your starting point.

Pay attention to the following student’s description of her bedroom and how she guides the reader through the viewing process, foot by foot.

Attached to my bedroom wall is a small wooden rack dangling with red and turquoise necklaces that shimmer as you enter. Just to the right of the rack is my window, framed by billowy white curtains. The peace of such an image is a stark contrast to my desk, which sits to the right of the window, layered in textbooks, crumpled papers, coffee cups, and an overflowing ashtray. Turning my head to the right, I see a set of two bare windows that frame the trees outside the glass like a 3D painting. Below the windows is an oak chest from which blankets and scarves are protruding. Against the wall opposite the billowy curtains is an antique dresser, on top of which sits a jewelry box and a few picture frames. A tall mirror attached to the dresser takes up most of the wall, which is the color of lavender.

The paragraph incorporates two objectives you have learned in this chapter: using an implied topic sentence and applying spatial order. Often in a descriptive essay, the two work together.

The following are possible transition words to include when using spatial order:

Just to the left or just to the right
On the left or on the right
Across from
A little further down
To the south, to the east, and so on
A few yards away
Turning left or turning right

On a separate sheet of paper, write a paragraph using spatial order that describes your commute to work, school, or another location you visit often.

Collaboration

Please share with a classmate and compare your answers.

Key Takeaways

The way you organize your body paragraphs ensures you and your readers stay focused on and draw connections to, your thesis statement.
A strong organizational pattern allows you to articulate, analyze, and clarify your thoughts.
Planning the organizational structure for your essay before you begin to search for supporting evidence helps you conduct more effective and directed research.
Chronological order is most commonly used in expository writing. It is useful for explaining the history of your subject, for telling a story, or for explaining a process.
Order of importance is most appropriate in a persuasion paper as well as for essays in which you rank things, people, or events by their significance.
Spatial order describes things as they are arranged in space and is best for helping readers visualize something as you want them to see it; it creates a dominant impression.

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Academic Writing

How to Organize an Essay

Last Updated: March 27, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Jake Adams . Jake Adams is an academic tutor and the owner of Simplifi EDU, a Santa Monica, California based online tutoring business offering learning resources and online tutors for academic subjects K-College, SAT & ACT prep, and college admissions applications. With over 14 years of professional tutoring experience, Jake is dedicated to providing his clients the very best online tutoring experience and access to a network of excellent undergraduate and graduate-level tutors from top colleges all over the nation. Jake holds a BS in International Business and Marketing from Pepperdine University. There are 17 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 284,365 times.

Essay Template and Sample Essay

Laying the Groundwork

Step 1 Determine the type of essay you're writing.

For example, a high-school AP essay should have a very clear structure, with your introduction and thesis statement first, 3-4 body paragraphs that further your argument, and a conclusion that ties everything together.
On the other hand, a creative nonfiction essay might wait to present the thesis till the very end of the essay and build up to it.
A compare-and-contrast essay can be organized so that you compare two things in a single paragraph and then have a contrasting paragraph, or you can organize it so that you compare and contrast a single thing in the same paragraph.
You can also choose to organize your essay chronologically, starting at the beginning of the work or historical period you're discussing and going through to the end. This can be helpful for essays where chronology is important to your argument (like a history paper or lab report), or if you're telling a story in your essay.
The “support” structure begins with your thesis laid out clearly in the beginning and supports it through the rest of the essay.
The “discovery” structure builds to the thesis by moving through points of discussion until the thesis seems the inevitable, correct view.
The “exploratory” structure looks at the pros and cons of your chosen topic. It presents the various sides and usually concludes with your thesis.

If you haven't been given an assignment, you can always run ideas by your instructor or advisor to see if they're on track.
Ask questions about anything you don't understand. It's much better to ask questions before you put hours of work into your essay than it is to have to start over because you didn't clarify something. As long as you're polite, almost all instructors will be happy to answer your questions.

For example, are you writing an opinion essay for your school newspaper? Your fellow students are probably your audience in this case. However, if you're writing an opinion essay for the local newspaper, your audience could be people who live in your town, people who agree with you, people who don't agree with you, people who are affected by your topic, or any other group you want to focus on.

Getting the Basics Down

A thesis statement acts as the “road map” for your paper. It tells your audience what to expect from the rest of your essay.
Include the most salient points within your thesis statement. For example, your thesis may be about the similarity between two literary works. Describe the similarities in general terms within your thesis statement.
Consider the “So what?” question. A good thesis will explain why your idea or argument is important. Ask yourself: if a friend asked you “So what?” about your thesis, would you have an answer?
The “3-prong thesis” is common in high school essays, but is often frowned upon in college and advanced writing. Don't feel like you have to restrict yourself to this limited form.
Revise your thesis statement. If in the course of writing your essay you discover important points that were not touched upon in your thesis, edit your thesis.

If you have a librarian available, don't be afraid to consult with him or her! Librarians are trained in helping you identify credible sources for research and can get you started in the right direction.

Try freewriting. With freewriting, you don't edit or stop yourself. You just write (say, for 15 minutes at a time) about anything that comes into your head about your topic.
Try a mind map. Start by writing down your central topic or idea, and then draw a box around it. Write down other ideas and connect them to see how they relate. [14] X Research source
Try cubing. With cubing, you consider your chosen topic from 6 different perspectives: 1) Describe it, 2) Compare it, 3) Associate it, 4) Analyze it, 5) Apply it, 6) Argue for and against it.

If your original thesis was very broad, you can also use this chance to narrow it down. For example, a thesis about “slavery and the Civil War” is way too big to manage, even for a doctoral dissertation. Focus on more specific terms, which will help you when you start you organize your outline. [16] X Trustworthy Source University of North Carolina Writing Center UNC's on-campus and online instructional service that provides assistance to students, faculty, and others during the writing process Go to source

Organizing the Essay

Step 1 Create an outline of the points to include in your essay.

Determine the order in which you will discuss the points. If you're planning to discuss 3 challenges of a particular management strategy, you might capture your reader's attention by discussing them in the order of most problematic to least. Or you might choose to build the intensity of your essay by starting with the smallest problem first.

Step 2 Avoid letting your sources drive your organization.

For example, a solid paragraph about Hamlet's insanity could draw from several different scenes in which he appears to act insane. Even though these scenes don't all cluster together in the original play, discussing them together will make a lot more sense than trying to discuss the whole play from start to finish.

Step 3 Write topic sentences for each paragraph.

Ensure that your topic sentence is directly related to your main argument. Avoid statements that may be on the general topic, but not directly relevant to your thesis.
Make sure that your topic sentence offers a “preview” of your paragraph's argument or discussion. Many beginning writers forget to use the first sentence this way, and end up with sentences that don't give a clear direction for the paragraph.
For example, compare these two first sentences: “Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743” and “Thomas Jefferson, who was born in 1743, became one of the most important people in America by the end of the 18th century.”
The first sentence doesn't give a good direction for the paragraph. It states a fact but leaves the reader clueless about the fact's relevance. The second sentence contextualizes the fact and lets the reader know what the rest of the paragraph will discuss.

Step 4 Use transitional words and sentences.

Transitions help underline your essay's overall organizational logic. For example, beginning a paragraph with something like “Despite the many points in its favor, Mystic Pizza also has several elements that keep it from being the best pizza in town” allows your reader to understand how this paragraph connects to what has come before.
Transitions can also be used inside paragraphs. They can help connect the ideas within a paragraph smoothly so your reader can follow them.
If you're having a lot of trouble connecting your paragraphs, your organization may be off. Try the revision strategies elsewhere in this article to determine whether your paragraphs are in the best order.
The Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin - Madison has a handy list of transitional words and phrases, along with the type of transition they indicate. [22] X Research source

You can try returning to your original idea or theme and adding another layer of sophistication to it. Your conclusion can show how necessary your essay is to understanding something about the topic that readers would not have been prepared to understand before.
For some types of essays, a call to action or appeal to emotions can be quite helpful in a conclusion. Persuasive essays often use this technique.
Avoid hackneyed phrases like “In sum” or “In conclusion.” They come across as stiff and cliched on paper.

Revising the Plan

You can reverse-outline on the computer or on a printed draft, whichever you find easier.
As you read through your essay, summarize the main idea (or ideas) of each paragraph in a few key words. You can write these on a separate sheet, on your printed draft, or as a comment in a word processing document.
Look at your key words. Do the ideas progress in a logical fashion? Or does your argument jump around?
If you're having trouble summarizing the main idea of each paragraph, it's a good sign that your paragraphs have too much going on. Try splitting your paragraphs up.

You may also find with this technique that your topic sentences and transitions aren't as strong as they could be. Ideally, your paragraphs should have only one way they could be organized for maximum effectiveness. If you can put your paragraphs in any order and the essay still kind of makes sense, you may not be building your argument effectively.

For example, you might find that placing your least important argument at the beginning drains your essay of vitality. Experiment with the order of the sentences and paragraphs for heightened effect.

Expert Q&A

↑ Jake Adams. Academic Tutor & Test Prep Specialist. Expert Interview. 20 May 2020.
↑ http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/planning-and-organizing/organizing
↑ http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/understanding-assignments/
↑ https://open.lib.umn.edu/writingforsuccess/chapter/6-1-purpose-audience-tone-and-content/
↑ https://www.student.unsw.edu.au/writing-your-essay
↑ https://www.hamilton.edu/writing/writing-resources/persuasive-essays
↑ http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/thesis-statements/
↑ http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/brainstorming/
↑ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/engagement/2/2/53/
↑ https://pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca/scholarlywriting/chapter/revising-a-thesis-statement/
↑ http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/reorganizing-drafts/
↑ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/essay-outline/
↑ https://wts.indiana.edu/writing-guides/paragraphs-and-topic-sentences.html
↑ http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/transitions/
↑ https://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/Transitions.html
↑ http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/conclusions/
↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/reading-aloud/

About This Article

To organize an essay, start by writing a thesis statement that makes a unique observation about your topic. Then, write down each of the points you want to make that support your thesis statement. Once you have all of your main points, expand them into paragraphs using the information you found during your research. Finally, close your essay with a conclusion that reiterates your thesis statement and offers additional insight into why it’s important. For tips from our English reviewer on how to use transitional sentences to help your essay flow better, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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4.3 Organizing Your Writing

Learning objectives.

Understand how and why organizational techniques help writers and readers stay focused.
Assess how and when to use chronological order to organize an essay.
Recognize how and when to use order of importance to organize an essay.
Determine how and when to use spatial order to organize an essay.

This section covers three ways to organize body paragraphs:

Chronological order
Order of importance
Spatial order

Chronological Order

In Chapter 3: The Writing Process: Where Do I Begin? Section Overview , you learned that chronological arrangement has the following purposes:

To explain the history of an event or a topic
To tell a story or relate an experience
To explain how to do or to make something
To explain the steps in a process

Connecting the Pieces: Writing at Work

Keep in mind that chronological order is most appropriate for the following purposes:

Writing essays containing heavy research
Writing essays with the aim of listing, explaining, or narrating
Writing essays that analyze literary works such as poems, plays, or books

Order of Importance

Recall from Chapter 3: The Writing Process: Where Do I Begin? that order of importance is best used for the following purposes:

Persuading and convincing
Ranking items by their importance, benefit, or significance
Illustrating a situation, problem, or solution

Some key transitional words you should use with this method of organization are most importantly , almost as importantly , just as importantly , and finally .

Spatial Order

As stated in Chapter 3: The Writing Process: Where Do I Begin? , spatial order is best used for the following purposes:

Helping readers visualize something as you want them to see it
Evoking a scene using the senses (sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound)
Writing a descriptive essay

Pay attention to the following student’s description of her bedroom and how she guides the reader through the viewing process, foot by foot.

The paragraph incorporates two objectives you have learned in this chapter: using an implied topic sentence and applying spatial order. Often in a descriptive essay, the two work together.

The following are possible transition words to include when using spatial order:

Just to the left or just to the right
On the left or on the right
Across from
A little further down
To the south, to the east, and so on
A few yards away
Turning left or turning right

On a separate sheet of paper, write a paragraph using spatial order that describes your commute to work, school, or another location you visit often.

Collaboration

Please share with a classmate and compare your answers.

Key Takeaways

The way you organize your body paragraphs ensures you and your readers stay focused on and draw connections to, your thesis statement.
A strong organizational pattern allows you to articulate, analyze, and clarify your thoughts.
Planning the organizational structure for your essay before you begin to search for supporting evidence helps you conduct more effective and directed research.
Chronological order is most commonly used in expository writing. It is useful for explaining the history of your subject, for telling a story, or for explaining a process.
Order of importance is most appropriate in a persuasion paper as well as for essays in which you rank things, people, or events by their significance.
Spatial order describes things as they are arranged in space and is best for helping readers visualize something as you want them to see it; it creates a dominant impression.

Putting the Pieces Together Copyright © 2020 by Andrew Stracuzzi and André Cormier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Organization and Structure

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

There is no single organizational pattern that works well for all writing across all disciplines; rather, organization depends on what you’re writing, who you’re writing it for, and where your writing will be read. In order to communicate your ideas, you’ll need to use a logical and consistent organizational structure in all of your writing. We can think about organization at the global level (your entire paper or project) as well as at the local level (a chapter, section, or paragraph). For an American academic situation, this means that at all times, the goal of revising for organization and structure is to consciously design your writing projects to make them easy for readers to understand. In this context, you as the writer are always responsible for the reader's ability to understand your work; in other words, American academic writing is writer-responsible. A good goal is to make your writing accessible and comprehensible to someone who just reads sections of your writing rather than the entire piece. This handout provides strategies for revising your writing to help meet this goal.

Note that this resource focuses on writing for an American academic setting, specifically for graduate students. American academic writing is of course not the only standard for academic writing, and researchers around the globe will have different expectations for organization and structure. The OWL has some more resources about writing for American and international audiences here .

Whole-Essay Structure

While organization varies across and within disciplines, usually based on the genre, publication venue, and other rhetorical considerations of the writing, a great deal of academic writing can be described by the acronym IMRAD (or IMRaD): Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. This structure is common across most of the sciences and is often used in the humanities for empirical research. This structure doesn't serve every purpose (for instance, it may be difficult to follow IMRAD in a proposal for a future study or in more exploratory writing in the humanities), and it is often tweaked or changed to fit a particular situation. Still, its wide use as a base for a great deal of scholarly writing makes it worthwhile to break down here.

Introduction : What is the purpose of the study? What were the research questions? What necessary background information should the reader understand to help contextualize the study? (Some disciplines include their literature review section as part of the introduction; some give the literature review its own heading on the same level as the other sections, i.e., ILMRAD.) Some writers use the CARS model to help craft their introductions more effectively.
Methods: What methods did the researchers use? How was the study conducted? If the study included participants, who were they, and how were they selected?
Results : This section lists the data. What did the researchers find as a result of their experiments (or, if the research is not experimental, what did the researchers learn from the study)? How were the research questions answered?
Discussion : This section places the data within the larger conversation of the field. What might the results mean? Do these results agree or disagree with other literature cited? What should researchers do in the future?

Depending on your discipline, this may be exactly the structure you should use in your writing; or, it may be a base that you can see under the surface of published pieces in your field, which then diverge from the IMRAD structure to meet the expectations of other scholars in the field. However, you should always check to see what's expected of you in a given situation; this might mean talking to the professor for your class, looking at a journal's submission guidelines, reading your field's style manual, examining published examples, or asking a trusted mentor. Every field is a little different.

Outlining & Reverse Outlining

One of the most effective ways to get your ideas organized is to write an outline. A traditional outline comes as the pre-writing or drafting stage of the writing process. As you make your outline, think about all of the concepts, topics, and ideas you will need to include in order to accomplish your goal for the piece of writing. This may also include important citations and key terms. Write down each of these, and then consider what information readers will need to know in order for each point to make sense. Try to arrange your ideas in a way that logically progresses, building from one key idea or point to the next.

Questions for Writing Outlines

What are the main points I am trying to make in this piece of writing?
What background information will my readers need to understand each point? What will novice readers vs. experienced readers need to know?
In what order do I want to present my ideas? Most important to least important, or least important to most important? Chronologically? Most complex to least complex? According to categories? Another order?

Reverse outlining comes at the drafting or revision stage of the writing process. After you have a complete draft of your project (or a section of your project), work alone or with a partner to read your project with the goal of understanding the main points you have made and the relationship of these points to one another. The OWL has another resource about reverse outlining here.

Questions for Writing Reverse Outlines

What topics are covered in this piece of writing?
In what order are the ideas presented? Is this order logical for both novice and experienced readers?
Is adequate background information provided for each point, making it easy to understand how one idea leads to the next?
What other points might the author include to further develop the writing project?

Organizing at the sentence and paragraph level

Signposting.

Signposting is the practice of using language specifically designed to help orient readers of your text. We call it signposting because this practice is like leaving road signs for a driver — it tells your reader where to go and what to expect up ahead. Signposting includes the use of transitional words and phrasing, and they may be explicit or more subtle. For example, an explicit signpost might say:

This section will cover Topic A and Topic B.

A more subtle signpost might look like this:

It's important to consider the impact of Topic A and Topic B.

The style of signpost you use will depend on the genre of your paper, the discipline in which you are writing, and your or your readers’ personal preferences. Regardless of the style of signpost you select, it’s important to include signposts regularly. They occur most frequently at the beginnings and endings of sections of your paper. It is often helpful to include signposts at mid-points in your project in order to remind readers of where you are in your argument.

Questions for Identifying and Evaluating Signposts

How and where does the author include a phrase, sentence, or short group of sentences that explains the purpose and contents of the paper?
How does each section of the paper provide a brief summary of what was covered earlier in the paper?
How does each section of the paper explain what will be covered in that section?
How does the author use transitional words and phrases to guide readers through ideas (e.g. however, in addition, similarly, nevertheless, another, while, because, first, second, next, then etc.)?

WORKS CONSULTED

Clark, I. (2006). Writing the successful thesis and dissertation: Entering the conversation . Prentice Hall Press.

Davis, M., Davis, K. J., & Dunagan, M. (2012). Scientific papers and presentations . Academic press.

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Many types of writing follow some version of the basic shape described above. This shape is most obvious in the form of the traditional five-paragraph essay: a model for college writing in which the writer argues his or her viewpoint (thesis) on a topic and uses three reasons or subtopics to support that position. In the five-paragraph model, as illustrated below, the introductory paragraph mentions the three main points or subtopics, and each body paragraph begins with a topic sentence dealing with one of those main points.

SAMPLE ESSAY USING THE FIVE-PARAGRAPH MODEL

Remember, this is a very simplistic model. It presents a basic idea of essay organization and may certainly be helpful in learning to structure an argument, but it should not be followed religiously as an ideal form.

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Organizing Your Writing

Writing for Success

Learning Objectives

Understand how and why organizational techniques help writers and readers stay focused.
Assess how and when to use chronological order to organize an essay.
Recognize how and when to use order of importance to organize an essay.
Determine how and when to use spatial order to organize an essay.

This section covers three ways to organize body paragraphs:

Chronological order
Order of importance
Spatial order

CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

Chronological arrangement (also called “time order,”) has the following purposes:

To explain the history of an event or a topic
To tell a story or relate an experience
To explain how to do or to make something
To explain the steps in a process

Chronological order is mostly used in expository writing, which is a form of writing that narrates, describes, informs, or explains a process. When using chronological order, arrange the events in the order that they actually happened, or will happen if you are giving instructions. This method requires you to use words such as first, second, then, after that, later, and finally. These transition words guide you and your reader through the paper as you expand your thesis.

WRITING AT WORK

Keep in mind that chronological order is most appropriate for the following purposes:

Writing essays containing heavy research
Writing essays with the aim of listing, explaining, or narrating
Writing essays that analyze literary works such as poems, plays, or books

ORDER OF IMPORTANCE

Order of importance is best used for the following purposes:

Persuading and convincing
Ranking items by their importance, benefit, or significance
Illustrating a situation, problem, or solution

Some key transitional words you should use with this method of organization are most importantly, almost as importantly, just as importantly, and finally.

SPATIAL ORDER

Spatial order is best used for the following purposes:

Helping readers visualize something as you want them to see it
Evoking a scene using the senses (sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound)
Writing a descriptive essay

Pay attention to the following student’s description of her bedroom and how she guides the reader through the viewing process, foot by foot.

The paragraph incorporates two objectives you have learned in this chapter: using an implied topic sentence and applying spatial order. Often in a descriptive essay, the two work together.

The following are possible transition words to include when using spatial order:

Just to the left or just to the right
On the left or on the right
Across from
A little further down
To the south, to the east, and so on
A few yards away
Turning left or turning right

Key Takeaways

The way you organize your body paragraphs ensures you and your readers stay focused on and draw connections to, your thesis statement.
A strong organizational pattern allows you to articulate, analyze, and clarify your thoughts.
Planning the organizational structure for your essay before you begin to search for supporting evidence helps you conduct more effective and directed research.
Chronological order is most commonly used in expository writing. It is useful for explaining the history of your subject, for telling a story, or for explaining a process.
Order of importance is most appropriate in a persuasion paper as well as for essays in which you rank things, people, or events by their significance.
Spatial order describes things as they are arranged in space and is best for helping readers visualize something as you want them to see it; it creates a dominant impression.

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How to Organise an Essay – A Comprehensive Guide & Examples

Published by Grace Graffin at August 17th, 2021 , Revised On October 11, 2023

The quality of a well-written essay largely depends on the quality of the content and the author’s writing style. Students with little to no essay writing experience almost always struggle to figure out how to organise an essay.

Even if you have great essay writing skills but are unable to keep the sequence of information right in your essay, you may not impress the readers.

A narrator cannot craft an engaging story until he learns to organise his vivid thoughts. The best way to organise an essay is to create a map of the essay beforehand to ensure that your essay’s structure allows for a smooth flow of information.

Here is all you need to learn in order to organise an essay.

The Importance of Organisation of an Essay

Readers are always looking for an essay that is easy in its approach, i.e. an essay that is reader-friendly and follows an easy-to-understand structure, etc.

Your essay should be organised to convey a clear message to the reader without using any vague statements. As an essayist, it will be your responsibility to make sure that there are no spelling, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation errors in the essay paper.

You might wonder why you need to put increased effort into the organisation of an essay. If you had the opportunity to work with a professional essayist or any other individual working in English literature, you would get to know that each of these professionals pays a lot of attention to organising an essay because a poorly structured essay can really turn away your readers.

Basic Essay Organisation

The first things to organise are what you are going to say and in what order you are going to say those things. After this, it is a case of refining those things. You can start by separating all your text into three sections: introduction , main body , and conclusion . Can it really be so simple? Yes, and of course, no. There are several ways to organise an essay depending on different factors.

Different Patterns for the Organisation of an Essay

There is no specific way of organising an essay. Multiple styles and methods are utilised by writers based on the academic subject, academic level, and expectations of the audience. Below we have discussed some of the most common ways to organise an essay.

Chronological Organisation

Organising an essay chronologically – sometimes called the cause-and-effect approach – is one of the simpler ways to organise your essay. This way of organisation tends to discuss the events in the specific order they occurred. The chronological organisation method is especially important for narrative and reflective essays .

The writer will be expected to recognise the sequence of events and structure the essay accordingly, i.e. what happens in the beginning, middle, and at end. Use this approach if it allows for the clearest and most logical presentation of your information.

Where is Chronological Organisation Used?

Scientific processes – Where a process has many steps, it is likely that the order of these steps is vital.
Historical events – Things are clearer for the reader when events in the past are relayed in the order in which they happened. This can also apply to political progress.
Biographies – Events that occurred in someone’s lifetime or examining events covering just a short time in one person’s life, such as a JFK’s final day.

Specific Language Needed

Essays that describe a succession of events following each other will require good use of prepositions of time. These are words, often pairs, such as next, after this/that, following on from that, later… Be careful not to overuse the same word, as this can become repetitive and tedious for the reader.

Spatial Organisation

The spatial organisation refers to describing items based on their physical locations or relation to other items. It often involves describing things as and when they appear. It makes it easier for the writer to give a vivid picture through the essay. This method tends to discuss comparisons, narrations, and descriptions .

When using this technique, make sure to organise the information pertaining to comparisons, narrations, and descriptions from either top to bottom or left to right. Note that while location and position are very important with this method, time is largely ignored.

Where is Spatial Organisation Used?

Descriptive essays – It is excellent for describing objects, people, and places. It is also useful for showing social or physical phenomena – the arrangement of a rainforest.
Narrating events – You can take the reader through a visual processor to describe events that occurred, showing them everything on the way.
Medical – Those who need to describe the workings of bodies, medicines, operations on bodies, and anatomy might choose this approach.
Technical construction – You can describe how a physical mechanism or building works or is constructed.

If you do not have a picture to show, you need to describe it.

For instance, if you are writing an essay about a brand-new, impressively featured smartphone, you can begin to brief about the smartphone starting from the top camera down to the buttons located at the bottom .

From the example above, you can see that an essay using spatial organisation will require you to talk about where things are. This will mean quite extensive and careful use of a group of words called prepositions , such as next to, attached to, near, behind, under, alongside… If you are describing movement, then there are prepositions that indicate movement, such as through, into, out of, toward, away from, and past.

You need to be specific in your use of prepositions as the reader might be imagining events with no image to refer to other than what you have described.

Climactic Order

This method is also known as organising by importance or ascending order. Following this technique, the writer starts the essay with the least important information and gradually moves towards the most important – the climax. The idea is to save the best till the last.

The introduction and conclusion are unaffected by this organisational style. The main body of the essay is where the structure is used. This type of organisation is applicable where there is no need for logical ordering. For example, in a scientific process, each step logically follows the previous one. Steps will vary in how eventful they are; you cannot write about such a process by saving the most eventful for the end.

When to Use Climactic Order

This method is sometimes used as a way of keeping readers interested, even in suspense. If written in the opposite direction, anticlimactic, you might lose readers after they have learned about the most exciting part.

In narrating a story or sequence of events that culminate in something serious or important, this is a good style to use.

Interested in ordering an essay?

Topical Organisation

As the name itself suggests, this form of organisation explains different features and sides of the topic with no specific order. Unlike climactic order, this type of essay organisation treats different aspects of one topic with the same importance. The way to achieve this is to divide the whole topic up into its subtopics and then define each one.

Where is Topical Organisation Used?

Scientific essays – This could be an exploratory essay, especially where an organism or something consisting of multiple parts has to be described.
Compare-and-contrast essays – Where things have to be compared against each other for their similarities and differences. This could be when comparing two pieces of art or literature; the works’ various aspects could be examined separately.
Descriptive essays – If, for example, you have to write an essay about yourself, you can describe the different aspects of your body and personality in their own sections.
Expository essays – Where something is explained with facts, not opinions, the subject can be broken down and looked at piece by piece.

For example , describing how information technology has had serious consequences on mankind can start with how people overlooked technology in the beginning. It could then discuss the causes of social media addiction that have taken the world by storm in recent times.

Comparing and Contrasting: Alternating and Block Methods

It is worth noting that compare-and-contrast essays can be structured in two distinct ways. They are the alternating method, where each part is compared in turn, and the block method, where each thing is considered in its entirety.

Using the alternating method to compare two cars, you might compare the bodywork of both, then move on to their interiors, and then the engines. The other way is the block method; here, you would write a full block discussing all aspects of one car and then a block discussing the same aspects of the other car.

Also Read: How to Develop Essay Topic Ideas

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Key Tips for Organising your Essay

Planning and organising your essay not only benefit the reader, but the writer also gets great help from the whole process. Following organisational patterns helps the writer by saving time without having to go through the same content repeatedly.

If you plan to develop a great essay , you must ensure good planning for your essay. Using the correct format to present your material will complement the material itself. Let’s discuss some key tips on how to organise an essay:

Also Read: Organisational Templates for Essays

Start your Essay with Simple Arguments

A good tactic in producing an organised essay is to start your essay by providing simple arguments. It does not mean that only simple arguments should be part of the essay. Relatively complex or difficult arguments should also be placed later in the main body of the essay .

If your readers can understand the most basic arguments, they will be more likely to grasp the message resulting from more complicated arguments and statements.

This further relates to the point that if you start your essay with simple information that your readers can agree to without much hesitation, you will be more likely to convince them to agree to more controversial arguments.

Get the Readers on your Side

As an example, by presenting a simple, well-understood scientific argument early on, you start to get your readers on board. You then present another argument that can be seen as a logical progression from the first. When you raise a more complex and possibly contentious argument, it helps if you can apply principles from your initial example. If the readers agreed with the basic argument, logically they would agree with the more complex version.

This early presentation of a simpler argument ties in with giving your audience background information early in the essay. While you might assume your readers understand the subject you are writing about, you should not skip background information by assuming they will know it.

Know your Audience

In this era of technological advancement, people tend to make quick decisions as they have to look at multiple platforms to find content. Understandably, the essay needs to be well structured and well formalised, yet it should be organised in a way that is user-friendly. If the audience you are going to target is not going to be enticed by it, you need to reconsider your approach and tactics.

Define Technical Terms

While providing information in the essay, make sure that you define all the technical terms that the readers may not be aware of. This needs to be done as the first step before you alienate and confuse your reader and he decides to avert.

It would be best if you drafted your essay in such a manner that a layperson can understand it without making any extra effort. Jargon or technical terms must be defined within the content.

If used excessively, you can describe these terms in a different paragraph, making it more convenient for the readers.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is an essay structure.

The structure of an essay is the way in which you present your material. This mostly applies to the main body of your essay. You can consider the introduction and conclusion parts as bookends that hold the main block of information in place. There are several ways to organise the main body, and they mostly depend on what kind of material you are presenting. Certain types of essays benefit from certain ways of delivering the information within.

An appropriately structured essay gives your arguments and ideas their best chance. When the correct structure is supported by well-written paragraphs and good use of transitions , it will be an impressive essay to read.

Is referencing affected by the essay style I choose?

No, the approach you take in organising your essay does not affect how you reference your sources. What affects your referencing is the formatting style you are instructed to use, such as Harvard , APA, MLA, or Chicago.

Are there fixed rules on which method of organising to use for certain subjects?

No, there is no rule that says you have to use a certain style. However, practice shows that the aims of certain types of essays are best achieved when presented in particular styles.

Do I have to provide a glossary of technical terms?

How you define technical terms to your readers is your choice. It can depend on the amount of them. If there are not many, they can be introduced within the text. If the essay topic is of a highly technical nature, then a separate sheet with definitions might be the best way to explain them without extending the length of your essay .

Organizing an Essay

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Some basic guidelines

The best time to think about how to organize your paper is during the pre-writing stage, not the writing or revising stage. A well-thought-out plan can save you from having to do a lot of reorganizing when the first draft is completed. Moreover, it allows you to pay more attention to sentence-level issues when you sit down to write your paper.

When you begin planning, ask the following questions: What type of essay am I going to be writing? Does it belong to a specific genre? In university, you may be asked to write, say, a book review, a lab report, a document study, or a compare-and-contrast essay. Knowing the patterns of reasoning associated with a genre can help you to structure your essay.

For example, book reviews typically begin with a summary of the book you’re reviewing. They then often move on to a critical discussion of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. They may conclude with an overall assessment of the value of the book. These typical features of a book review lead you to consider dividing your outline into three parts: (1) summary; (2) discussion of strengths and weaknesses; (3) overall evaluation. The second and most substantial part will likely break down into two sub-parts. It is up to you to decide the order of the two subparts—whether to analyze strengths or weaknesses first. And of course it will be up to you to come up with actual strengths and weaknesses.

Be aware that genres are not fixed. Different professors will define the features of a genre differently. Read the assignment question carefully for guidance.

Understanding genre can take you only so far. Most university essays are argumentative, and there is no set pattern for the shape of an argumentative essay. The simple three-point essay taught in high school is far too restrictive for the complexities of most university assignments. You must be ready to come up with whatever essay structure helps you to convince your reader of the validity of your position. In other words, you must be flexible, and you must rely on your wits. Each essay presents a fresh problem.

Avoiding a common pitfall

Though there are no easy formulas for generating an outline, you can avoid one of the most common pitfalls in student papers by remembering this simple principle: the structure of an essay should not be determined by the structure of its source material. For example, an essay on an historical period should not necessarily follow the chronology of events from that period. Similarly, a well-constructed essay about a literary work does not usually progress in parallel with the plot. Your obligation is to advance your argument, not to reproduce the plot.

If your essay is not well structured, then its overall weaknesses will show through in the individual paragraphs. Consider the following two paragraphs from two different English essays, both arguing that despite Hamlet’s highly developed moral nature he becomes morally compromised in the course of the play:

(a) In Act 3, Scene 4, Polonius hides behind an arras in Gertrude’s chamber in order to spy on Hamlet at the bidding of the king. Detecting something stirring, Hamlet draws his sword and kills Polonius, thinking he has killed Claudius. Gertrude exclaims, “O, what a rash and bloody deed is this!” (28), and her words mark the turning point in Hamlet’s moral decline. Now Hamlet has blood on his hands, and the blood of the wrong person. But rather than engage in self-criticism, Hamlet immediately turns his mother’s words against her: “A bloody deed — almost as bad, good Mother, as kill a king, and marry with his brother” (29-30). One of Hamlet’s most serious shortcomings is his unfair treatment of women. He often accuses them of sins they could not have committed. It is doubtful that Gertrude even knows Claudius killed her previous husband. Hamlet goes on to ask Gertrude to compare the image of the two kings, old Hamlet and Claudius. In Hamlet’s words, old Hamlet has “Hyperion’s curls,” the front of Jove,” and “an eye like Mars” (57-58). Despite Hamlet’s unfair treatment of women, he is motivated by one of his better qualities: his idealism. (b) One of Hamlet’s most serious moral shortcomings is his unfair treatment of women. In Act 3, Scene 1, he denies to Ophelia ever having expressed his love for her, using his feigned madness as cover for his cruelty. Though his rantings may be an act, they cannot hide his obsessive anger at one particular woman: his mother. He counsels Ophelia to “marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them” (139-41), thus blaming her in advance for the sin of adultery. The logic is plain: if Hamlet’s mother made a cuckold out of Hamlet’s father, then all women are capable of doing the same and therefore share the blame. The fact that Gertrude’s hasty remarriage does not actually constitute adultery only underscores Hamlet’s tendency to find in women faults that do not exist. In Act 3, Scene 4, he goes as far as to suggest that Gertrude shared responsibility in the murder of Hamlet’s father (29-30). By condemning women for actions they did not commit, Hamlet is doing just what he accuses Guildenstern of doing to him: he is plucking out the “heart” of their “mystery” (3.2.372-74).

The second of these two paragraphs is much stronger, largely because it is not plot-driven. It makes a well-defined point about Hamlet’s moral nature and sticks to that point throughout the paragraph. Notice that the paragraph jumps from one scene to another as is necessary, but the logic of the argument moves along a steady path. At any given point in your essays, you will want to leave yourself free to go wherever you need to in your source material. Your only obligation is to further your argument. Paragraph (a) sticks closely to the narrative thread of Act 3, Scene 4, and as a result the paragraph makes several different points with no clear focus.

What does an essay outline look like?

Most essay outlines will never be handed in. They are meant to serve you and no one else. Occasionally, your professor will ask you to hand in an outline weeks prior to handing in your paper. Usually, the point is to ensure that you are on the right track. Nevertheless, when you produce your outline, you should follow certain basic principles. Here is an example of an outline for an essay on Hamlet :

This is an example of a sentence outline. Another kind of outline is the topic outline. It consists of fragments rather than full sentences. Topic outlines are more open-ended than sentence outlines: they leave much of the working out of the argument for the writing stage.

When should I begin putting together a plan?

The earlier you begin planning, the better. It is usually a mistake to do all of your research and note-taking before beginning to draw up an outline. Of course, you will have to do some reading and weighing of evidence before you start to plan. But as a potential argument begins to take shape in your mind, you may start to formalize your thoughts in the form of a tentative plan. You will be much more efficient in your reading and your research if you have some idea of where your argument is headed. You can then search for evidence for the points in your tentative plan while you are reading and researching. As you gather evidence, those points that still lack evidence should guide you in your research. Remember, though, that your plan may need to be modified as you critically evaluate your evidence.

How can I construct a usable plan?

Here are two methods for constructing a plan. The first works best on the computer. The second method works well for those who think visually. It is often the method of choice for those who prefer to do some of their thinking with pen and paper, though it can easily be transposed to a word processor or your graphic software of choice.

method 1: hierarchical outline

This method usually begins by taking notes. Start by collecting potential points, as well as useful quotations and paraphrases of quotations, consecutively. As you accumulate notes, identify key points and start to arrange those key points into an outline. To build your outline, take advantage of outline view in Word or numbered lists in Google Docs. Or consider one of the specialized apps designed to help organize ideas: Scrivener, Microsoft OneNote, Workflowy, among others. All these tools make it easy for you to arrange your points hierarchically and to move those points around as you refine your plan.You may, at least initially, keep your notes and your outline separate. But there is no reason for you not to integrate your notes into the plan. Your notes—minor points, quotations, and paraphrases—can all be interwoven into the plan, just below the main points they support. Some of your notes may not find a place in your outline. If so, either modify the plan or leave those points out.

method 2: the circle method

This method is designed to get your key ideas onto a single page, where you can see them all at once. When you have an idea, write it down, and draw a circle around it. When you have an idea that supports another idea, do the same, but connect the two circles with a line. Supporting source material can be represented concisely by a page reference inside a circle. The advantage of the circle method is that you can see at a glance how things tie together; the disadvantage is that there is a limit to how much material you can cram onto a page.

Here is part of a circle diagram

Once you are content with your diagram, you have the option of turning it into an essay outline.

What is a reverse outline?

When you have completed your first draft, and you think your paper can be better organized, consider using a reverse outline. Reverse outlines are simple to create. Just read through your essay, and every time you make a new point, summarize it in the margin. If the essay is reasonably well-organized, you should have one point in the margin for each paragraph, and your points read out in order should form a coherent argument. You might, however, discover that some of your points are repeated at various places in your essay. Other points may be out of place, and still other key points may not appear at all. Think of all these points as the ingredients of an improved outline which you now must create. Use this new outline to cut and paste the sentences into a revised version of your essay, consolidating points that appear in several parts of your essay while eliminating repetition and creating smooth transitions where necessary.

You can improve even the most carefully planned essay by creating a reverse outline after completing your first draft. The process of revision should be as much about organization as it is about style.

How much of my time should I put into planning?

It is self-evident that a well-planned paper is going to be better organized than a paper that was not planned out. Thinking carefully about how you are going to argue your paper and preparing an outline can only add to the quality of your final product. Nevertheless, some people find it more helpful than others to plan. Those who are good at coming up with ideas but find writing difficult often benefit from planning. By contrast, those who have trouble generating ideas but find writing easy may benefit from starting to write early. Putting pen to paper (or typing away at the keyboard) may be just what is needed to get the ideas to flow.

You have to find out for yourself what works best for you, though it is fair to say that at least some planning is always a good idea. Think about whether your current practices are serving you well. You know you’re planning too little if the first draft of your essays is always a disorganized mess, and you have to spend a disproportionate amount of time creating reverse outlines and cutting and pasting material. You know you’re planning too much if you always find yourself writing your paper a day before it’s due after spending weeks doing research and devising elaborate plans.

Be aware of the implications of planning too little or too much.

Planning provides the following advantages :

helps you to produce a logical and orderly argument that your readers can follow
helps you to produce an economical paper by allowing you to spot repetition
helps you to produce a thorough paper by making it easier for you to notice whether you have left anything out
makes drafting the paper easier by allowing you to concentrate on writing issues such as grammar, word choice, and clarity

Overplanning poses the following risks :

doesn’t leave you enough time to write and revise
leads you to produce papers that try to cover too much ground at the expense of analytic depth
can result in a writing style that lacks spontaneity and ease
does not provide enough opportunity to discover new ideas in the process of writing

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4.2: The Writing Process for Literary Essays

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Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap
City College of San Francisco via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative

Why Follow the Writing Process?

Even the most talented writers rarely get a piece right in their first draft. What's more, few writers create a first draft through a single, sustained effort. Instead, the best writers understand that writing is a process: it takes time; sustained attention; and a willingness to change, expand, and even delete words as one writes. Good writing also takes a willingness to seek feedback from peers and mentors and to accept and use the advice they give. In this book, we will refer to and model the writing process , showing how student writers like yourself worked toward compelling papers about literary works. Watch the video below where author Salman Rushdie talks about some misconceptions new writers sometimes have about what it takes to write effectively. Though he is discussing novels specifically, the same concepts apply to literary essays.

The following are a few famous writers' pieces of advice when it comes to following the writing process:

"For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts"—Anne Lamott
"The key to writing is concentration, not inspiration"—Salman Rushdie
"By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this." —Roald Dahl (Vander Hook)
"I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive." —Susan Sontag (Lee)

Take it from the writing experts: following the writing process is the key to writing success. Following this process can be liberatory in the sense that you don't have to feel an immense pressure to write brilliantly. The best writing takes time, incremental effort, and resilience.

As I often tell my students:

"There is no such thing as bad writers, only writers who give up too soon. There is no such thing as bad writing, just writing in need of revision." This means anyone can write a strong essay if they follow the writing process!

Your process

How do you typically approach writing assignments in your classes? When do you start working? Do you employ any prewriting techniques?
Have you ever been given the chance to revise your writing after receiving feedback from your peers or your instructor? How did the act of revising change your relationship to your paper?

Good writing takes, above all, planning and organization. If you wait until the night before a written assignment is due to begin, your hurrying will supersede the necessary steps of prewriting, researching, outlining, drafting, revising, seeking feedback, and re-revising. Those stages look something like this:

The Writing Process Steps

First, read the work of literature you plan to write about. This may seem like an obvious step, but some students think they can write an effective essay by just reading the SparkNotes or Shmoop. While some students may be able to get away with writing a passing essay this way, most cannot. Besides, by completing the readings, you actually learn!

Many of the questions and activities peppered throughout sections of this book will be prewriting activities. We'll ask you to reflect on your reading, to make connections between your experiences and our text, and to jot down ideas spurred by your engagement with the theories presented here. It's from activities like these that writers often get their ideas for writing. The more engaged you are as a reader, the more engaged you'll be when the time comes to write.

Researching

This book will also help you start the research process, in which you hone in on those aspects of a given literary text that interest you and seek out a deeper understanding of those aspects. Literary researchers read not only literary texts but also the work of other literary scholars and even sources that are indirectly related to literature, such as primary historical documents and biographies. In other words, they seek a wide range of texts that can supplement their understanding of the story, poem, play, or other text they want to write about. As you research, you should keep prewriting, keeping a record of what you agree with, what you disagree with, and what you feel needs further exploration in the texts you read.

To write well, you should have a plan. As you write, that plan may change while you learn more about your topic and begin to fully understand your own ideas. However, papers are easier to tackle when you first sketch out the broad outline of your ideas, a general arc or path you want your paper to follow. Committing those ideas to paper will help you see how different ideas relate to one another (or don't relate to one another). Don't be afraid to revise your outline — play around with the sequence of your ideas and evidence until you find the most logical progression.

The most important way to improve your writing is to start writing! Because you’re treating writing as a process, it's not important that every word you type be perfectly chosen, or that every sentence be exquisitely crafted. When you're drafting, the most important thing is that you get words on paper. Follow your outline and write. If ideas come to you as you're writing, but do not quite fit in that section of the paper, make note of it! You don't have to use it, but few things are more frustrating than forgetting an idea that might work perfectly for your paper.

After you've committed words to paper (or, more accurately, to your computer screen), you can go back and shape them more deliberately through revision . Cognitive research has shown that a significant portion of reading is actually remembering. As a result, if you read your work immediately after writing it, you probably won't notice any of the potential problems with it. Your brain will "fill in the gaps" of poor grammar, misspelling, or faulty reasoning. Because of this, you should give yourself some time in between drafting and revising—the more time the better. As you revise, try to approach your text as your readers will. Ask yourself skeptical questions (e.g., Are there clear connections between the different claims I'm making in this paper? Do I provide enough evidence to convince someone to believe my claims?). Revisions can often be substantial: you may need to rearrange your points, delete significant portions of what you've written, or rewrite sentences and paragraphs to better reflect the ideas you have developed while writing. Don't be afraid to cut the parts of your paper that aren't working, even if you like a particular fact or anecdote. Don't be afraid to, as they say, "Kill your darlings." Everything in your paper should, on some level, work towards the purpose of your claim. Most importantly, you should revise your introduction several times. Writers often work into their strongest ideas, which then appear in their conclusions but not (if they do not revise) their introductions. Make sure that your introduction reflects the more nuanced claims that appear in the body and conclusion of your paper.

Seeking Feedback

Even after years of practice revising your writing, you'll never be able to see it in an entirely objective light. To really improve your writing, you need feedback from others who can identify where your ideas are not as clear as they should be. You can seek feedback in a number of ways: you can make an appointment in your college's writing center, you can participate in class peer-review workshops, or you can talk to your instructor during his or her office hours. If you will have a chance to revise your paper after your instructor grades it, his or her comments on that graded draft should be considered essential feedback as you revise.

Re-revising

Once you've garnered feedback on your writing, you should use that feedback to revise your paper yet again. You should not, however, simply make every change that your colleagues or instructor recommended. You should think about the suggestions they've made and ensure that their suggestions will help you make the argument you want to make. You may decide to incorporate some suggestions and not others. Not all feedback is helpful or applicable. It takes some critical thinking to determine whether the feedback will improve the essay. When you treat writing as a process, it should become a genuine dialogue between you and your readers.

Finally, you will submit your paper to an audience for review. As college students, this primarily means the paper you turn in to your instructor for evaluation.

Writing Process Not Linear, But a Cycle

The preceding categories suggest that writing is a linear process — that is, that you will follow these steps in the following order:

prewriting→researching→outlining→drafting→revising→feedback→re-revising→publishing.

The reality of the writing process, however, is that as you write you shuttle back and forth in these stages. For example, as you begin writing your thesis paragraph, the beginning of your essay, you will write and revise many times before you are satisfied with your opening; once you have a complete draft, you will more than likely return to the introduction to revise it again to better match the contents of the completed essay. This shuttling highlights the recursive nature of the writing process and can be diagrammed as follows:

prewriting↔researching↔outlining↔drafting↔revising↔feedback↔re-revising↔publishing.

This is a good thing. If you are too rigid in your process, it's easier to get stuck on insisting an idea or claim that might not be working, rather than discovering one or coming to an informed, well-reasoned conclusion. Furthermore, you should be aware that each writer has a unique writing process: some will be diligent outliners, while others may discover ideas as they write. There is no right way to write (so to speak), but the key is the notion of process — all strong writers engage in the writing process and recognize the importance of feedback and revision in the process.

Describe your current writing process.
Do you normally engage in the stages listed previously?
If not, why? If so, what part of the process do you find most helpful?

Share your process with the class to discover the variety of approaches writers take. Always be willing to try new methods of approaching the writing process. You might find a new tool or habit that works well for you!

Works Cited

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life . Random House, 1994.

Lee, Martin. Telling Stories: The Craft of Narrative and Writing Life . University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

Rushdie, Salman. "Inspiration is Nonsense." The Big Think, 2011. https://bigthink.com/videos/inspiration-is-nonsense

Vander Hook, Sue. Writing Notable Narrative Nonfiction . Lerner Publishing Group, 2016.

Contributors and Attributions

Adapted from "What is the Writing Process?" from Creating Literary Analysis by Ryan Cordell and John Pennington, CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

This chapter is about the importance of organizing a draft with a clear outline. This step is sometimes combined with the previous step in the writing process—developing a thesis statement. Some writers find it helpful to first jot down their main ideas in outline form, and then use that visual to help develop an overarching thesis statement. Ultimately, moving from thesis statement to outline is dynamic: writers often develop an initial hunch, work out the kinds through an outline, and then revise the thesis each point becomes more obviously structured. This chapter, “Organize,” will stress the importance of planning and structure in the writing process.

The Importance of Organization

Your prewriting activities and readings have helped you gather information for your assignment. The more you sort through the pieces of information you found, the more you will begin to see the connections between them. Patterns and gaps may begin to stand out. But only when you start to organize your ideas will you be able to translate your raw insights into a form that will communicate meaning to your audience.

When you write, you need to organize your ideas in an order that makes sense. The writing you complete in all your courses exposes how analytically and critically your mind works. In some courses, the only direct contact you may have with your instructor is through the assignments you write for the course. You can make a good impression by spending time ordering your ideas.

Order refers to your choice of what to present first, second, third, and so on in your writing. The order you pick closely relates to your purpose for writing that particular assignment. For example, when telling a story, it may be important to first describe the background for the action. Or you may need to first describe a 3-D movie projector or a television studio to help readers visualize the setting and scene. You may want to group your support effectively to convince readers that your point of view on an issue is well reasoned and worthy of belief.

In longer pieces of writing, you may organize different parts in different ways so that your purpose stands out clearly and all parts of the paper work together to consistently develop your main point.

Methods of Organizing Writing

The three common methods of organizing writing are chronological order , spatial order , and order of importance . You need to keep these methods of organization in mind as you plan how to arrange the information you have gathered in an outline. An outline is a written plan that serves as a skeleton for the paragraphs you write. Later, when you draft paragraphs in the next stage of the writing process, you will add support to create “flesh” and “muscle” for your assignment.

When you write, your goal is not only to complete an assignment but also to write for a specific purpose—perhaps to inform, to explain, to persuade, or for a combination of these purposes. Your purpose for writing should always be in the back of your mind, because it will help you decide which pieces of information belong together and how you will order them. In other words, choose the order that will most effectively fit your purpose and support your main point.

Table “Order versus Purpose” shows the connection between order and purpose.

For an essay question on a test or a brief oral presentation in class, all you may need to prepare is a short, informal outline in which you jot down key ideas in the order you will present them. This kind of outline reminds you to stay focused in a stressful situation and to include all the good ideas that help you explain or prove your point.

For a longer assignment, like an essay or a research paper, many college instructors require students to submit a formal outline before writing a major paper as a way to be sure you are on the right track and are working in an organized manner. A formal outline is a detailed guide that shows how all your supporting ideas relate to each other. It helps you distinguish between ideas that are of equal importance and ones that are of lesser importance. You build your paper based on the framework created by the outline.

Instructors may also require you to submit an outline with your final draft to check the direction of the assignment and the logic of your final draft. If you are required to submit an outline with the final draft of a paper, remember to revise the outline to reflect any changes you made while writing the paper.

Topic and sentence outlines

There are two types of formal outlines: the topic outline and the sentence outline. You format both types of formal outlines in the same way.

Place your introduction and thesis statement at the beginning, under roman numeral I.
Use roman numerals (II, III, IV, V, etc.) to identify main points that develop the thesis statement.
Use capital letters (A, B, C, D, etc.) to divide your main points into parts.
Use arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.) if you need to subdivide any As, Bs, or Cs into smaller parts.
End with the final roman numeral expressing your idea for your conclusion.

Here is what the skeleton of a traditional formal outline looks like. The indention helps clarify how the ideas are related.

Introduction

Thesis statement

Main point 1 → becomes the topic sentence of body paragraph 1

Main point 2 → becomes the topic sentence of body paragraph 2

Main point 3 → becomes the topic sentence of body paragraph 3

In an outline, any supporting detail can be developed with subpoints. For simplicity, the model shows them only under the first main point.

Formal outlines are often quite rigid in their organization. As many instructors will specify, you cannot subdivide one point if it is only one part. For example, for every roman numeral I, there must be a For every A, there must be a B. For every arabic numeral 1, there must be a 2. See for yourself on the sample outlines that follow.

Topic outlines

A topic outline is the same as a sentence outline except you use words or phrases instead of complete sentences. Words and phrases keep the outline short and easier to comprehend. All the headings, however, must be written in parallel structure.

Here is the topic outline that Mariah constructed for the essay she is developing. Her purpose is to inform, and her audience is a general audience of her fellow college students. Notice how Mariah begins with her thesis statement. She then arranges her main points and supporting details in outline form using short phrases in parallel grammatical structure.

Writing an Effective Topic Outline

This checklist can help you write an effective topic outline for your assignment. It will also help you discover where you may need to do additional reading or prewriting.

Do I have a controlling idea that guides the development of the entire piece of writing?
Do I have three or more main points that I want to make in this piece of writing? Does each main point connect to my controlling idea?
Is my outline in the best order—chronological order, spatial order, or order of importance—for me to present my main points? Will this order help me get my main point across?
Do I have supporting details that will help me inform, explain, or prove my main points?
Do I need to add more support? If so, where?
Do I need to make any adjustments in my working thesis statement before I consider it the final version?

Writing at Work

Word processing programs generally have an automatic numbering feature that can be used to prepare outlines. This feature automatically sets indents and lets you use the tab key to arrange information just as you would in an outline. Although in business this style might be acceptable, in college your instructor might have different requirements. Teach yourself how to customize the levels of outline numbering in your word-processing program to fit your instructor’s preferences.

Exercise 4.1

Using the working thesis statement you wrote in the previous chapter, “Thesis Statements,” and the results of your brainstorming from “Generating Ideas,” construct a topic outline for your essay. Be sure to observe correct outline form, including correct indentions and the use of Roman and arabic numerals and capital letters.

Collaboration

Please share with a classmate and compare your outline. Point out areas of interest from their outline and what you would like to learn more about.

Sentence Outlines

A sentence outline is the same as a topic outline except you use complete sentences instead of words or phrases. Complete sentences create clarity and can advance you one step closer to a draft in the writing process.

Here is the sentence outline that Mariah constructed for the essay she is developing.

The information compiled under each roman numeral will become a paragraph in your final paper. In the previous example, the outline follows the standard five-paragraph essay arrangement, but longer essays will require more paragraphs and thus more roman numerals. If you think that a paragraph might become too long or stringy, add an additional paragraph to your outline, renumbering the main points appropriately.

PowerPoint presentations, used both in schools and in the workplace, are organized in a way very similar to formal outlines. PowerPoint presentations often contain information in the form of talking points that the presenter develops with more details and examples than are contained on the PowerPoint slide.

Exercise 4.2

Expand the topic outline you prepared in the previous execise to make it a sentence outline. In this outline, be sure to include multiple supporting points for your main topic even if your topic outline does not contain them. Be sure to observe correct outline form, including correct indentations and the use of Roman and arabic numerals and capital letters.

Key Takeaways

Writers must put their ideas in order so the assignment makes sense. The most common orders are chronological order, spatial order, and order of importance.
After gathering and evaluating the information you found for your essay, the next step is to write a working, or preliminary, thesis statement.
The working thesis statement expresses the main idea that you want to develop in the entire piece of writing. It can be modified as you continue the writing process.
Effective writers prepare a formal outline to organize their main ideas and supporting details in the order they will be presented.
A topic outline uses words and phrases to express the ideas.
A sentence outline uses complete sentences to express the ideas.
The writer’s thesis statement begins the outline, and the outline ends with suggestions for the concluding paragraph.

Write What Matters Copyright © 2020 by Liza Long; Amy Minervini; and Joel Gladd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Module 1: An Overview of the Writing Process

Organizing an essay.

There are many elements that must come together to create a good essay. The topic should be clear and interesting. The author’s voice should come through, but not be a distraction. There should be no errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, or capitalization. Organization is one of the most important elements of an essay that is often overlooked. An organized essay is clear, focused, logical and effective.

Organization makes it easier to understand the thesis. To illustrate, imagine putting together a bike. Having all of the necessary tools, parts, and directions will make the job easier to complete than if the parts are spread across the room and the tools are located all over the house. The same logic applies to writing an essay. When all the parts of an essay are in some sort of order, it is both easier for the writer to put the essay together and for the reader to understand the main ideas presented in the essay.

Photo of a white kitchen lit with windows. Rows of glass jars line shelves over the countertop, and a hanging rack of pans and pots appears beneath that.

Strategy 1. Reverse Outlining

If your paper is about Huckleberry Finn, a working thesis might be: “In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.” However, you might feel uncertain if your paper really follows through on the thesis as promised.

This paper may benefit from reverse outlining. Your aim is to create an outline of what you’ve already written, as opposed to the kind of outline that you make before you begin to write. The reverse outline will help you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of both your organization and your argument.

Read the draft and take notes Read your draft over, and as you do so, make very brief notes in the margin about what each paragraph is trying to accomplish.

Outline the Draft After you’ve read through the entire draft, transfer the brief notes to a fresh sheet of paper, listing them in the order in which they appear. The outline might look like this:

Paragraph 1: Intro
Paragraph 2: Background on Huck Finn
Paragraph 3: River for Huck and Jim
Paragraph 4: Shore and laws for Huck and Jim
Paragraph 5: Shore and family, school
Paragraph 6: River and freedom, democracy
Paragraph 7: River and shore similarities
Paragraph 8: Conclusion

Examine the Outline Look for repetition and other organizational problems. In the reverse outline above, there’s a problem somewhere in Paragraphs 3-7, where the potential for repetition is high because you keep moving back and forth between river and shore.

Re-examine the Thesis, the Outline, and the Draft Together Look closely at the outline and see how well it supports the argument in your thesis statement. You should be able to see which paragraphs need rewriting, reordering or rejecting. You may find some paragraphs are tangential or irrelevant or that some paragraphs have more than one idea and need to be separated.

Strategy 2. Talk It Out

Drawing of two men sitting at a cafe table talking. They are wearing period dress (bowlers, suits, bow ties).

Find a Friend, your T.A., your Professor, a relative, a Writing Center tutor, or any sympathetic and intelligent listener. People are more accustomed to talking than writing, so it might be beneficial to explain your thinking out loud to someone before organizing the essay. Talking to someone about your ideas may also relieve pressure and anxiety about your topic.

Explain What Your Paper Is About Pay attention to how you explain your argument verbally. It is likely that the order in which you present your ideas and evidence to your listener is a logical way to arrange them in your paper. Let’s say that you begin (as you did above) with the working thesis. As you continue to explain, you realize that even though your draft doesn’t mention “private enterprise” until the last two paragraphs, you begin to talk about it right away. This fact should tell you that you probably need to discuss private enterprise near the beginning.

Take Notes You and your listener should keep track of the way you explain your paper. If you don’t, you probably won’t remember what you’ve talked about. Compare the structure of the argument in the notes to the structure of the draft you’ve written.

Get Your Listener to Ask Questions As the writer, it is in your interest to receive constructive criticism so that your draft will become stronger. You want your listener to say things like, “Would you mind explaining that point about being both conservative and liberal again? I wasn’t sure I followed” or “What kind of economic principle is government relief? Do you consider it a good or bad thing?” Questions you can’t answer may signal an unnecessary tangent or an area needing further development in the draft. Questions you need to think about will probably make you realize that you need to explain more your paper. In short, you want to know if your listener fully understands you; if not, chances are your readers won’t, either. [2]

Strategy 3. Paragraphs

Readers need paragraph breaks in order to organize their reading. Writers need paragraph breaks to organize their writing. A paragraph break indicates a change in focus, topic, specificity, point of view, or rhetorical strategy. The paragraph should have one main idea; the topic sentence expresses this idea. The paragraph should be organized either spatially, chronologically, or logically. The movement may be from general to specific, specific to general, or general to specific to general. All paragraphs must contain developed ideas: comparisons, examples, explanations, definitions, causes, effects, processes, or descriptions. There are several concluding strategies which may be combined or used singly, depending on the assignment’s length and purpose:

a summary of the main points
a hook and return to the introductory “attention-getter” to frame the essay
a web conclusion which relates the topic to a larger context of a greater significance
a proposal calling for action or further examination of the topic
a question which provokes the reader
a vivid image or compelling narrative [3]

Put Paragraphs into Sections You should be able to group your paragraphs so that they make a particular point or argument that supports your thesis. If any paragraph, besides the introduction or conclusion, cannot fit into any section, you may have to ask yourself whether it belongs in the essay.

Re-examine each Section Assuming you have more than one paragraph under each section, try to distinguish between them. Perhaps you have two arguments in favor of that can be distinguished from each other by author, logic, ethical principles invoked, etc. Write down the distinctions — they will help you formulate clear topic sentences.

Re-examine the Entire Argument Which section do you want to appear first? Why? Which Second? Why? In what order should the paragraphs appear in each section? Look for an order that makes the strongest possible argument. [4]

Organizing an Essay ↵
Reorganizing Your Draft ↵
Parts of an Essay ↵
Authored by : J. Indigo Eriksen. Provided by : Blue Ridge Community College. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
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Essay Writing Part 2: How to Organise Your Research

Introduction

Often students fail to make the proper connection between their research stage and writing their first draft. They may not have completed a research stage correctly, so when they sit down to write their essay, they may feel as if they are starting from scratch. Or they may not have recorded their research correctly, resulting in them needing to repeat work in order to write or properly reference their essay. Or they may have conducted and recorded their research but not organised it correctly, which again serves to make the writing stage more difficult than it needs to be.

This guide will explain how to use a research document to organise your research. This is one Word document in which all your research is recorded and organised following the structure of your essay plan.

Using this method will ensure that you will not need to repeat any work unnecessarily, you will be able to easily distinguish between your own notes and direct quotations, and you will have already collected the information needed for your referencing. Further, this method means that you are not just recording what you are reading, you are analysing it and organising it into themes or topics as you go, the way you will discuss it in your essay. This allows you to make all the decisions required in order to write your essay before you begin writing the first draft, making the transition between research and writing easier and smoother, and helping to eliminate feelings of writer’s block. Remember, you can also learn about how to organise your research by watching the video on Capstone Editing's YouTube channel .

Using a research document

The basis of your research document is your rough essay plan. Turn each section of your plan into a heading under which you can record your research. For example, in the essay plan above, Topic 1 is ‘Disease and demographic impact’. This will be a heading in your research document. As you research this topic, you will be able to separate the information you gather on ‘disease and demographic impact’ into additional subheadings, such as ‘types of diseases’, as in the example below. Subheadings are important for helping you organise your notes and navigate your research document.

Example entry in a research file:

Topic X: Name of topic The subject of the paragraph ‘The exact wording of the source goes here, using punctuation marks so you can see that you are quoting.’ (Put the reference information here.) [Your notes and ideas go here. Your own words go in square brackets and do not have punctuation marks.] Topic 1: Disease and demographic impact Types of diseases ‘Epidemic disease introduced from Europe and Africa repeatedly swept through Latin America, beginning before the fall of Tenochtitlan. Smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, pneumonic plague, and pestilential fevers were the most prominent killers.’ (Burkholder & Johnson 2012, p. 267.) [This is important introductory information that I should put at the beginning of the discussion.]

You should record both direct quotations from the sources you read and your own notes, in your own words, but you must make it clear which is which. You can do this by putting quotation marks around direct quotations, or putting your own words in brackets, or by using different colours or fonts. The example above uses quotation marks for direct quotations and puts the student’s own words in square brackets.

You should begin compiling your bibliography (or reference list) in your research document as soon as you begin your research. When you start reading a source, add the reference to your list. This way, you will have the reference already completed when you use that material in your essay. Also be sure to include the full reference information, including page numbers, for all the information you record in your research document at every instance where you record it, especially direct quotations. Using good research practices means there is no such thing as ‘doing your referencing at the end’.

How a research document helps you research and write your essay

The most common (and ineffective) ways of note-taking while researching an essay are 1) highlighting source documents and taking notes in comment boxes or margins and 2) typing notes into a Word document arranged by source. Both of these methods have problems, including not being able to remember where you read a certain piece of information, accidentally thinking that an idea is your own when it is actually from a source, and spending too much time researching one topic at the expense of others. Correctly using a research document overcomes these problems.

By critically arranging and organising material in a Word document as you research and adding your own notes (clearly marked as different from the words of others), you will have an easy-to-navigate collection of all the most important information you have gathered during your research, making it quick to find any information you are looking for. You will have clearly marked your own words as distinct from the words of others, reducing the chance of accidental plagiarism. You will also be able to see at a glance which topics you have plenty of information for and which topics you need to focus on more.

Moreover, through the process of compiling a research document, you will be thinking more clearly about 1) the argument you will make in your essay, 2) the most directly relevant supporting points to make, and 3) the relative importance of those points (which determines how many words you will spend on them, and in turn how much research time you should spend on them).

The advantages of working in this way are:

You will minimise wasted research effort.
You will develop your essay plan as you research.
You will have all the information you need to move seamlessly into the essay writing stage.

How your research document helps you to refine your essay plan

Using a research document, all decisions about what will go into your essay and in what order will be made during the research stage, before you even start writing. A common mistake made by students is to think that the research and writing stage are distinct steps, without important and necessary connections.

As you research, you may find that your rough essay plan needs to be adapted to fit the information you are finding. For example, you might find that one topic area is broader and more important than others, perhaps requiring a few subheadings. These subheadings will become paragraphs in your essay. You might find that a topic you think is going to be important is not, but that another topic you have not thought of is commonly mentioned in the literature. You will therefore decide to discuss this topic rather than the other. You will also be thinking about the relative importance of the topics to supporting your argument. You must order your topics from most to least important.

As the final step in the research stage, you will need to decide which information from your research document should be included in the essay, and what you can leave out. You will now have a document that shows:

the topics and subheadings (i.e. the sections and paragraphs) that will comprise your essay, with all information to be included organised under these headings
the order in which you will write about your topics
all necessary referencing information, to help you write a plagiarism-free essay.

The result will be a clear map, containing all necessary information and referencing details, to writing your essay. Using this method, you will never again start the writing phase feeling you are starting from scratch. You are now ready to follow the process detailed in the next article in this series, ‘How to Finalise Your Essay Plan’.

Related Guides

Essay writing: everything you need to know and nothing you don’t—part 1: how to begin.

This guide will explain everything you need to know about how to organise, research and write an argumentative essay.

Essay Writing Part 3: How to Finalise Your Essay Plan

The key to successful essay writing is to finalise a detailed essay plan, carefully refined during the research stage, before beginning to write your essay.

How to Write the First Draft

By this stage, you will have a clear plan and all the information you need to write a well-structured essay, in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take.

Part 5: How to Finalise and Polish Your Essay

Before handing in any assignment, you must take the time to carefully edit and proofread it. This article explains exactly how to do so effectively.

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Our 15th Annual Summer Reading Contest

Students are invited to tell us what they’re reading in The Times and why, this year in writing OR via a 90-second video. Contest dates: June 7 to Aug. 16.

By The Learning Network

The illustrations for this post were originally created by Adolfo Redaño for “ Summer Books 2023 .”

Our Summer Reading Contest is our longest-running challenge — and our simplest.

All you have to do to participate is tell us what you’re reading, watching or listening to in The New York Times and why.

Don’t have a subscription? No problem! We’ll be providing dozens of free links to teen-friendly articles, essays, videos, podcasts and graphics every week from June through August.

And this summer, both to celebrate the contest’s 15th year and to shake things up a bit, we’ll be trying something new: Students can enter as they always have by submitting a short written response — or they can make a video up to 90 seconds long.

Got questions? We have answers. Everything you need is detailed below.

But if you’re a teacher who would like to have your students practice for this now, before the contest begins, note that the only rule around content is that a piece must have been published in 2024. Beyond that, we don’t care if your students pick something on cats , chatbots , the cost of college or the crisis in the Middle East ; Beyoncé , book bans , basketball or banana bread . We just want to hear what they think. To help, we’ve created a special practice forum . Join us!

Have fun, and, as always, post your questions here or write to [email protected].

This announcement is available as a one-page PDF to hang on your class bulletin board.

Here’s what you need to know:

The challenge, rules and guidelines, resources for teachers, students and parents, frequently asked questions, how to submit.

An illustration, resembling a child’s drawing, of a woman in a hammock reading a book beneath two palm trees. Other books are scattered on the sand beneath her.

Choose something in The New York Times that got your attention and tell us why — via a short written or video response.

Here’s how the contest works:

Every Friday for 10 weeks beginning on June 7, we will publish a post asking the same question: “What got your attention in The Times this week?” That’s where you should submit your response any time until the following Friday at 9 a.m. Eastern, when we will close that post and open a new one that asks the same question. On Aug. 9 we’ll post our final question of the summer, open until 9 a.m. on Aug. 16.

You can enter every week, or any week, all summer long, but you may only submit once each week.

You can always find the proper link to the place to submit at the top of this page, updated each week. Once the contest begins, you can also find it on our home page . Please see the How to Submit section below for more details.

You can choose anything you like that was published in the print paper or on nytimes.com in 2024, including articles, Opinion and guest essays , videos , graphics, photos and podcasts . To see the variety of topics winners have responded to over the years, read this column .

Then tell us what Times piece you chose and why it got your attention via a 250-word essay OR a 90-second video. See the full Rules and Guidelines for each type of response below. We have a contest rubric , as well as a guide for students that details four simple ways to make your response stand out.

We’ll choose winners each week, and every Tuesday during the contest, starting June 25, we’ll publish them in a separate post, which you can find here . All written and video entries will be judged together. We will also celebrate the winners on Facebook.

Please read these rules and guidelines carefully before you make your submissions.

Guidelines for written responses

Your written response should tell us what you read, watched or listened to in The Times and why it got your attention. You can find many examples in this column , which spotlights the work of our previous winners.

This guide walks you through some of the key elements of a great reader response, including making a personal connection to the piece, thinking critically about it, referencing specific details or quotes, and writing in your own unique voice.

Here are some guidelines to keep in mind:

Written responses must be no more than 1,500 characters, or about 250 words.

Make sure to i nclude the complete URL or headline of the Times piece you have chosen. For example, “The Joys and Challenges of Caring for Terrance the Octopus” or https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/us/tiktok-octopus-pet-oklahoma.html. Yes, this is included in the word count.

Guidelines for video responses

Just as with written responses, video responses should explain what Times piece you chose and why you chose it. The advice in this guide , while originally created with written responses in mind, can apply to video, as well.

We hope you’ll be creative, but that doesn’t mean your video has to be complicated or use special effects; sometimes simple is best. All you need is yourself and the camera on your phone to make a great video response.

Here are the guidelines:

Use a phone to shoot your video vertically (so it looks like the videos you might see on TikTok or Instagram Reels ).

Your video must be 90 seconds or fewer .

Please be sure to say or show the headline of the Times piece you are discussing.

Your video MAY NOT use any images, video clips, music or sound effects, other than those that appear in the Times piece you are discussing or what you create yourself. We cannot publish your video if it uses any copyrighted images or sounds — including TikTok sounds.

Make sure we can see and hear your video clearly. Pay attention to lighting and try to limit background noise as much as possible if it’s not an intentional part of your video.

Please do not include anyone else in your video. For the most part, we recommend filming only yourself, inanimate objects, animals, or your Times piece. You may film crowds of people in public places, but, to protect people’s privacy, try to avoid any close-ups.

A few additional rules

These rules apply to both written and video responses:

You can participate as often as every week, but we allow only ONE submission per person per week.

Any teenager 13 to 19 years old anywhere in the world is invited to join us , as long as you are in middle or high school, or have graduated from high school in 2024 and haven’t started college yet. See below, How to Submit , for more details.

The children and stepchildren of New York Times employees are not eligible to enter this contest. Teenagers who live in the same household as a Times employee are also ineligible.

The work you submit should be fundamentally your own — it should not be plagiarized, created by someone else or generated by artificial intelligence.

Your work must be original for this contest. That means it should not already have been published at the time of submission, whether in your school newspaper, for another contest, or anywhere else.

Keep in mind that the work you send in should be appropriate for a Times audience — that is, something that could be published in a family newspaper (so, please, no curse words).

For this contest, you must work alone , not in pairs or a group.

Entries must be received by the deadline at 9 a.m. Eastern time each Friday to be considered.

We have created many resources to help students practice for and participate in this contest over the years. Although they were written with the goal of helping students create written responses, many of them can work for video, too.

Writing Resources and Lesson Plans: Our full unit on independent reading and writing has lesson plans, writing prompts and mentor texts that can support students in the kind of thinking we’re asking them to do for this contest.

But, to see how easy this contest is, you might start with “ A Simple Exercise for Encouraging Independent Reading .” We invited four teachers across the country to try a short experiment in which they challenged their students to read a Times article on a topic within their comfort zone, and one article on a topic outside it. In this piece, they and their students reflect on the successful results.

We also have a Student Opinion question that challenges any student to do the same.

Student Mentors: “ Writing Rich Reading Responses: Participating in Our Summer Contest ” showcases a series of student-written mentor texts that demonstrate the four key elements that can make a short response — whether in a written or video format — sing.

You can also read all of the winning student entries from 2017 to the present , including reflections from many participants and judges.

And, check out a video version of our “Annotated by the Author” series (embedded above) in which two student winners of our 2020 contest discuss the “writer’s moves” they made.

Webinars: Teachers, to learn more about this contest and how you can teach with it, watch this free on-demand webinar from 2020 . And, to get ideas for supporting your students’ independent reading and writing, watch this on-demand webinar from 2021 .

Our Rubric: This is the rubric our judges will use to judge this contest. We’re looking for written and video responses that include personal connections, critical thinking, references to the source material, and voice and style.

Q. What kinds of responses are you looking for?

A. The subject matter isn’t important; neither is whether you loved or hated it. What we care about is what you have to say about why you picked it.

If you don’t believe us, scroll through the work of previous winners . They have written on weighty topics like abortion , racism , the war in Ukraine , Alzheimer’s disease , climate change and the dangers of vaping , but they have also covered handbags , hummingbirds , the Minions , text messaging , staycations , power naps, junk food , Wordle , Disney shows, running and bagels.

Whatever the subject, you’ll see that the best responses year after year make personal connections to the news and discuss the broader questions and ideas that the topic raises. We have even created a guide that outlines four simple things you can do to make your responses more powerful. We will use this rubric to judge entries.

So whether you were moved by an article , irked by an essay , bowled over by a photo , or inspired by a video , simply find something in The Times that genuinely interests you and tell us why, as honestly and originally as you can.

Q. Since you now offer the option to respond in video, are you looking for something different in that format?

Short answer: No. Longer answer: We’re excited to see what you come up with! We’ve purposely not put a lot of guidelines around what you can create since a) it’s summer, and we want this to be casual and b) we hope you’ll surprise us and show us what’s possible.

Though at the beginning all our contests focused on writing, in recent years we’ve been trying to encourage other forms of composition and expression. We hope you’ll take a risk and submit in video at least once this summer.

Q. Who will be judging my work?

A. The Learning Network staff, a team of New York Times journalists, along with educators from across the country.

Q. What is the “prize”?

A. The prize for winning any of our contests is having your work published on The Learning Network.

Q. When should I check to see if my submission won?

A. Every Tuesday from June 25 until Aug. 27, we will publish the previous week’s winner or winners in a separate article that you can find here . We will also celebrate the winners on Facebook.

Q. How do I participate in this contest if I don’t have a digital subscription to The Times?

A. All Learning Network posts for students, as well as all Times articles linked from them, are accessible without a digital subscription . So if you use any of the articles we have linked to on our site, they will not be blocked.

Each time we pose our question — “What got your attention in The Times this week?” — we will link to dozens of recent, teen-friendly pieces that you can choose from if you don’t have your own subscription.

You can also find copies of The New York Times at most public libraries, and some even allow you to access NYTimes.com with your library card.

And remember: You can use anything published anytime in 2024.

Q. How do I prove to my teacher that I participated?

A. If you are 13 to 19 in the United States and Britain — or 16 to 19 elsewhere in the world — and are submitting your written response by posting a comment, make sure to check the box that asks if you would like to be emailed when your comment is published. If you do so, the system will send you a link to your comment, which you can use to show your teacher, your parents, your friends or anyone else you’d like to impress. (Please note that you will not get an email until the comment has been approved, which may take longer over weekends.)

If you are submitting a video response or an adult is submitting a written response on behalf of an eligible student via the embedded form at the bottom of the post, please take a screenshot if a student needs proof that they are participating in the contest. You will not receive a confirmation email.

Another method? Some teachers ask students to keep a Google Doc of all their submissions, while others instruct students to take screenshots of their responses before they hit “submit.”

Q. How can teachers, librarians and parents use this challenge?

A. Our goals for this contest include some that appear on many educators’ lists. We want to help students become more aware of the world and their place in it; learn how to navigate sophisticated nonfiction; and create for a real audience, beyond the classroom. But more than anything else, we just want students to realize that reading the newspaper can be fun.

Through the years, adults have told us over and over that participating in this contest has made their students both more aware of and more interested in what’s going on in the world. Many see it as a low-stakes way to help teenagers start building a news-reading habit.

And, too, at a time when some educators are alarmed by the ability of chatbots to do students’ work for them, this is a contest that rewards the human touch. As our step-by-step guide to participating shows, what we’re looking for are genuine personal connections to the news, explored with voice, style and personality — something A.I. can’t (yet?) do with anywhere near the verve of the teenagers we hear from.

Another reason? For some teachers, assigning the contest over the summer helps them to quickly get to know their new students when school starts. In our related webinar , Karen Gold, English department chair at The Governor’s Academy in Byfield, Mass., details how she uses the contest in this way.

But maybe the most compelling reason to assign this contest is what students themselves say about it. In 2017, Emma Weber, a student from London, posted that, thanks to the contest, “I feel grounded in my views and understand what’s going on in the world. It’s amazing what a change 1,500 characters a week make.” In 2020 we invited Emma to help judge the entries, and here is what she had to say after Week 10:

I know firsthand that the Summer Reading Contest has the ability to change the way one engages in the news — I went from passively reading to actively thinking and questioning. The more you reflect on what is going on in the world and what interests you about it, the more you will understand your place within it. I urge all those who enjoyed participating this summer to continue reading, reflecting and writing.

Thank you for making this contest a hit year after year, and please spread the word that it’s back for its 15th season.

Any 13- to 19-year-old anywhere in the world is invited to join us, if you are in middle or high school, or if you graduated from high school and haven’t yet started college.

Every Friday starting on June 7, we’ll post a fresh version of this question: “What got your attention in The Times this week?” We will link to each week’s version at the top of this post. Here is an example from last summer. How you respond to this question will depend on your age and whether you are choosing to respond via writing or video, but all responses will be judged together.

For written responses:

Students ages 13 to 19 in the United States and Britain — and ages 16 to 19 elsewhere in the world — can submit by posting a comment on the post itself. See the GIF below to see how to do that.

If you are a teacher, parent or guardian of a student or child who is ages 13 to 15 anywhere in the world besides the United States and Britain, then you should submit an entry on the student’s behalf using the form embedded at the bottom of each week’s post.

For video responses:

All students should use the form at the bottom of each week’s post to submit video responses. Students ages 13 to 19 in the United States and Britain — and ages 16 to 19 elsewhere in the world — can submit their own entries. Students ages 13 to 15 anywhere else in the world must have a parent, teacher or guardian submit on their behalf.

The Trump Trial’s Extraordinary Opening

The first days of the criminal case against the former president have been mundane, even boring—and that’s remarkable.

This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here .

The defendant nodded off a couple of times on Monday. And I have to confess, as a spectator in an overflow courtroom watching on closed-circuit television, so did I.

Legal proceedings can be like that. Mundane, even boring. That’s how the first couple of days of the trial in The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump , Indictment No. 71543–2023, felt much of the time. Ordinary—despite being so extraordinary. And, frankly, that was comforting. The ordinary mechanics of the criminal-litigation process were applied fairly, efficiently, and methodically to a defendant of unparalleled notoriety, one who has devoted himself to undermining the rule of law.

Certainly the setting was ordinary. When the Criminal Courts Building, at 100 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan, first opened in 1941, an architectural critic lamented that the Art Deco structure, a New Deal/Public Works Administration project, was “ uncommunicative .” Eight decades later, it still has little to say. Raw and spartan, it’s a bit of a mystery to people who aren’t familiar with it (including me, a civil litigator who, despite having been admitted to the New York state bar some 35 years ago, practiced mostly in federal and Delaware courts). A pool reporter yesterday described the surroundings as “drab.”

Drab indeed, but busy—very busy. There’s never a want of bustle here, of the sort you would expect. As the former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann put it this week, 100 Centre is, “well, Dickensian—a beehive of activity with miscreants, state prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, probation officers, court security [and] families—in dark, dingy halls and courtrooms.” It’s a bit like New York City as a whole: How it functions, with the volume it handles, never ceases to amaze.

And how the court manages to keep track of things, Lord only knows. In contrast with the federal courts or even New York’s civil courts, it has no electronic, publicly accessible docket. The Supreme Court of the State of New York for the County on New York, Criminal Term, is, as one courthouse reporter said last month, “stuck in the past.” It’s a tribunal “where the official record is a disorganized and incomplete mass of paper with no accounting of what’s inside.” The records come in brown accordion folders—Redwelds, lawyers call them—and what judges and clerks decide to put in them is the record, and what they don’t is not.

But somehow it works. Somehow the court manages to dispose of thousands of cases a year, involving all manner of defendants and offenses. A calendar emailed to journalists by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office listing the week’s anticipated court appearances gives you the flavor. It catalogs names seemingly of many ethnicities, with a couple of corporate entities to boot. A hodgepodge of alleged charges, including the violent and the corrupt: robbery, conspiracy, forgery, criminal mischief, identity theft, enterprise corruption, stalking, murder, attempted murder, sex trafficking, grand larceny, attempted grand larceny, possession of a forged instrument, offering a false statement for filing.

And the list contained three cases involving the crime of falsifying business records, one of which was set for trial on Monday, April 15, in Part 59, Courtroom 1530— People v. Trump .

Nothing on the calendar, other than the defendant’s readily recognizable name, would have told you there was anything special about the case. In that sense, it was ordinary. But the hubbub outside—a handful of protesters, multiple television cameras, and a long line for the press and other spectators—made clear that something somewhat special was afoot. An overflow courtroom down the hall from the main courtroom offered a closed-circuit television feed of the proceedings. Those who had lined up went through an extra set of security screeners and machines—mandated, we were told, by the United States Secret Service.

But still, so much was ordinary—the stuff of the commencement of a criminal trial, housekeeping of the sort you’d see in virtually any court about to try a criminal case. That began promptly at 10 a.m. on Monday, when Judge Juan Merchan assumed the bench. There were loose ends for the judge to tie up, pending motions to decide. Merchan denied the defendant’s motion to recuse, reading, in even tones, an opinion from the bench. The motion was frivolous; the result unsurprising. And then the parties argued some motions in limine—pretrial efforts to exclude evidence.

For example, would the notorious Access Hollywood tape that rocked the 2016 presidential campaign be played for the jury? The prosecution said it should be: An assistant district attorney said the tape would elucidate why the defendant and his campaign were so hell-bent, to the point of falsifying business records, on keeping additional instances of the defendant’s miscreant conduct with women out of the public eye. The defense, of course, argued that playing the tape would be prejudicial. After all, this wasn’t a case about sexual assault.

The judge allowed that the tape’s existence provided context for the business-records charges but ruled that actually showing the tape to the jury would be prejudicial. Instead, the jury would be given a transcript. And speaking of sexual assault, prosecutors tried to get in an excerpt from Trump’s deposition in the E. Jean Carroll sexual-assault and defamation cases in which Trump testified that he was a “star,” and that stars historically get to do to women what Trump said on the Access Hollywood tape that he liked to do to them. Judge Merchan rightly said no, he would not allow the jury to hear that. It would be too much, too beside the point of what this case (unlike the Carroll cases) is actually about.

But as unusual and colorful as the factual predicate for the evidentiary motions was, the argument wasn’t all that interesting. It was rather low-key, in fact. Perhaps that was because none of the proffered evidence was new. But it was also because the arguing of pretrial evidentiary motions, however crucial they may be (although these, frankly, weren’t), is seldom scintillating. I can’t imagine that Donald Trump and I were the only ones watching who dozed off.

Then came jury selection, which took the rest of Monday, all of yesterday, and will probably consume tomorrow and Friday as well. (The judge will be handling his other cases today.) That was a bit more interesting, but slow going at first. Again, the ordinary met the extraordinary. Ninety-six potential jurors were brought in. The judge provided an overview of the case in the broadest terms, describing the charges in a few sentences; explained what his role and what the jury’s would be; and read the names of the cast of characters (some would be witnesses, others would simply be mentioned, including—full disclosure—my ex-wife). Still, it was mundane. It was pretty much what a judge would say in any big case.

And jury selection was a bit tedious; in a case like this, it simply has to be. Jurors were asked to give oral answers—some 42 of them, including a number with multiple subparts—to a written questionnaire. In substance: Where do you live? What do you do? What’s your educational background? What news sources do you read? What’s your experience with the legal system? Have you ever been to a Trump rally or followed him on social media? Have you belonged to any anti-Trump groups? And on and on and and on. But the most important inquiries came toward the end of the list: questions asking whether the prospective jurors could be fair. Occasionally the judge would interject, when an unusual or unclear answer was given. And once in a while there was a moment of levity: One woman—in response to a question about having relatives or close friends in the legal field—noted that she had once dated a lawyer. “It ended fine,” she volunteered, with a flatness of tone that betrayed no hint of nostalgia or loss.

This process took well over a day, and included brief follow-up questioning—“voir dire”—by the lawyers for both sides. But the judge did take a shortcut, one that saved a great deal of effort: After describing the case, but before proceeding to the individual-by-individual, question-by-question process, he asked the entire group the bottom-line question: Do any of you think you couldn’t judge the case fairly? Roughly two-thirds of this first batch of potential jurors said they couldn’t. That was extraordinary—a reflection of the fact that everyone knows who the defendant is, and that not many people lack a strong opinion about him.

And during the lawyers’ voir dire, a few interesting moments did occur, mostly when Trump’s lawyers pulled out social-media posts that they claimed showed possible bias on the part of the remaining candidates in the jury pool. One man was stricken by the court for cause because he once posted that Trump should be locked up. The Trump lawyers attempted, but failed, to get the court to strike a woman whose husband had posted some joking commentary about the former president. The judge’s response: That’s all you have? He allowed the juror to stay, and left it to counsel to decide whether to use their limited number of peremptory strikes.

In the end, for two days, the extraordinary intertwined with the ordinary, as it should in a case like this one. As one young woman from the Upper East Side, now to be known as Juror No. 2, put it during the selection process, “No one is above the law.” Let’s hope that sentiment prevails.

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NPR editor Uri Berliner resigns with blast at new CEO

David Folkenflik

Uri Berliner resigned from NPR on Wednesday saying he could not work under the new CEO Katherine Maher. He cautioned that he did not support calls to defund NPR. Uri Berliner hide caption

Uri Berliner resigned from NPR on Wednesday saying he could not work under the new CEO Katherine Maher. He cautioned that he did not support calls to defund NPR.

NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner resigned this morning, citing the response of the network's chief executive to his outside essay accusing NPR of losing the public's trust.

"I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years," Berliner wrote in an email to CEO Katherine Maher. "I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay."

NPR and Maher declined to comment on his resignation.

The Free Press, an online site embraced by journalists who believe that the mainstream media has become too liberal, published Berliner's piece last Tuesday. In it, he argued that NPR's coverage has increasingly reflected a rigid progressive ideology. And he argued that the network's quest for greater diversity in its workforce — a priority under prior chief executive John Lansing – has not been accompanied by a diversity of viewpoints presented in NPR shows, podcasts or online coverage.

Later that same day, NPR pushed back against Berliner's critique.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff . "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

Yet Berliner's commentary has been embraced by conservative and partisan Republican critics of the network, including former President Donald Trump and the activist Christopher Rufo.

Rufo is posting a parade of old social media posts from Maher, who took over NPR last month. In two examples, she called Trump a racist and also seemed to minimize the effects of rioting in 2020. Rufo is using those to rally public pressure for Maher's ouster, as he did for former Harvard University President Claudine Gay .

Others have used the moment to call for the elimination of federal funding for NPR – less than one percent of its roughly $300 million annual budget – and local public radio stations, which derive more of their funding from the government.

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

Berliner reiterated in his resignation letter that he does not support such calls.

In a brief interview, he condemned a statement Maher issued Friday in which she suggested that he had questioned "whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity." She called that "profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning."

Berliner subsequently exchanged emails with Maher, but she did not address those comments.

"It's been building up," Berliner said of his decision to resign, "and it became clear it was on today."

For publishing his essay in The Free Press and appearing on its podcast, NPR had suspended Berliner for five days without pay. Its formal rebuke noted he had done work outside NPR without its permission, as is required, and shared proprietary information.

(Disclosure: Like Berliner, I am part of NPR's Business Desk. He has edited many of my past stories. But he did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Earlier in the day, Berliner forwarded to NPR editors and other colleagues a note saying he had "never questioned" their integrity and had been trying to raise these issues within the newsroom for more than seven years.

What followed was an email he had sent to newsroom leaders after Trump's 2016 win. He wrote then: "Primarily for the sake of our journalism, we can't align ourselves with a tribe. So we don't exist in a cocoon that blinds us to the views and experience of tens of millions of our fellow citizens."

Berliner's critique has inspired anger and dismay within the network. Some colleagues said they could no longer trust him after he chose to publicize such concerns rather than pursue them as part of ongoing newsroom debates, as is customary. Many signed a letter to Maher and Edith Chapin, NPR's chief news executive. They asked for clarity on, among other things, how Berliner's essay and the resulting public controversy would affect news coverage.

Yet some colleagues privately said Berliner's critique carried some truth. Chapin also announced monthly reviews of the network's coverage for fairness and diversity - including diversity of viewpoint.

She said in a text message earlier this week that that initiative had been discussed long before Berliner's essay, but "Now seemed [the] time to deliver if we were going to do it."

She added, "Healthy discussion is something we need more of."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

Katherine Maher
uri berliner

Jamaica teen takes top prize in NYPD essay-writing contest

Tina Perumal, 18, bested 300 teens vying for an award in the Police Athletic League-NYPD annual essay competition. She snagged the prestigious NYPD Commander Award, one of a handful of NYPD awards for essay writing. The contest was open to all New York City students in grades 9-12.

Perumal was honored on Tuesday during the Police Commissioner for a Day Ceremony. Her essay was noteworthy since it was based on the concept of her being appointed police commissioner, where she used the high-ranking position to bring together a task force to combat child neglect.

Perumal said the essay was inspired by a close friend who went through a traumatic childhood experience, which prompted her to focus on the topic. “My essay was basically helping to bring back child safety and bring attention to the child safety that doesn’t really get looked at or recognized,” she said.

Perumal, a senior at Martin Van Buren High School , plans to attend John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the fall. She grew up watching shows such as “Law and Order” and other crime series, and now plans to be a police officer. “That’s where my mind and my heart has always been set on,” she said. “I just also want to help everybody around me and just protect everyone.”

When she is not spending time writing award-winning essays, Perumal works as an administrative intern at Life Camp’s Creative Arts Lab . She has been working with the organization since 2022 and oversees middle and elementary school students in the program. Perumal said her time working at Life Camp has inspired her to expand her own world view.

“They provide a lot of opportunities for you to get yourself out there. To be something you never saw yourself becoming or changing yourself that you never saw yourself changing to be,” she said. Currently, Perumal is working with staff on raising funds for a trip to Six Flags so they can celebrate the work they have done at the Creative Arts Lab over the past two years.

Life Camp’s mission is to provide youth and families in Southeast Queens impacted by gun violence with tools to stay in school and out of the criminal justice system. The organization offers programs to affected youngsters and their families as part of the initiative.

The Creative Arts Lab is a program sponsored by Life Camp targeting youth aged 12-24. The lab offers educational programs focused on arts education including DJing, composition and recording, theater, dance, painting and an array of other artistic mediums.

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6 Common Leadership Styles — and How to Decide Which to Use When

Rebecca Knight

Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances call for different approaches.

Research suggests that the most effective leaders adapt their style to different circumstances — be it a change in setting, a shift in organizational dynamics, or a turn in the business cycle. But what if you feel like you’re not equipped to take on a new and different leadership style — let alone more than one? In this article, the author outlines the six leadership styles Daniel Goleman first introduced in his 2000 HBR article, “Leadership That Gets Results,” and explains when to use each one. The good news is that personality is not destiny. Even if you’re naturally introverted or you tend to be driven by data and analysis rather than emotion, you can still learn how to adapt different leadership styles to organize, motivate, and direct your team.

Much has been written about common leadership styles and how to identify the right style for you, whether it’s transactional or transformational, bureaucratic or laissez-faire. But according to Daniel Goleman, a psychologist best known for his work on emotional intelligence, “Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances may call for different approaches.”

RK Rebecca Knight is a journalist who writes about all things related to the changing nature of careers and the workplace. Her essays and reported stories have been featured in The Boston Globe, Business Insider, The New York Times, BBC, and The Christian Science Monitor. She was shortlisted as a Reuters Institute Fellow at Oxford University in 2023. Earlier in her career, she spent a decade as an editor and reporter at the Financial Times in New York, London, and Boston.

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Gig workers are writing essays for AI to learn from

Companies are hiring highly educated gig workers to write training content for AI models .
The shift toward more sophisticated trainers comes as tech giants scramble for new data sources.
AI could run out of data to learn from by 2026, one research institute has warned.

As artificial intelligence models run out of data to train themselves on, AI companies are increasingly turning to actual humans to write training content.

For years, companies have used gig workers to help train AI models on simple tasks like photo identification , data annotation, and labelling. But the rapidly advancing technology now requires more advanced people to train it.

Companies such as Scale AI and Surge AI are hiring part-timers with graduate degrees to write essays and creative prompts for the bots to gobble up, The New York Times reported . Scale AI, for example, posted a job last year looking for people with Master's degrees or PhDs, who are fluent in either English, Hindi, or Japanese and have professional writing experience in fields like poetry, journalism, and publishing.

Watch: Nearly 50,000 tech workers have been laid off — but there's a hack to avoid layoffs

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How to Structure an Essay
The basic structure of an essay always consists of an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. But for many students, the most difficult part of structuring an essay is deciding how to organize information within the body. This article provides useful templates and tips to help you outline your essay, make decisions about your structure, and ...
9.3 Organizing Your Writing
Exercise 3. On a separate sheet of paper, write a paragraph that discusses a passion of yours. Your passion could be music, a particular sport, filmmaking, and so on. Your paragraph should be built upon the reasons why you feel so strongly. Briefly discuss your reasons in the order of least to greatest importance.
PDF Tips for Organizing Your Essay
Harvard College Writing Center 1 Tips for Organizing Your Essay If you are used to writing essays that are similar to the five-paragraph essay (one claim and then three points that support that claim), it can be daunting to think about how to structure your ideas in a longer essay. Once you've established your thesis, you need to
How to Organize an Essay (with Pictures)
Create an outline of the points to include in your essay. [17] Use your thesis statement to determine the trajectory of your outline. For example, if you will compare and contrast two different topics, outline the similarities and the differences. [18] Determine the order in which you will discuss the points.
PDF Strategies for Essay Writing
Harvard College Writing Center 5 Asking Analytical Questions When you write an essay for a course you are taking, you are being asked not only to create a product (the essay) but, more importantly, to go through a process of thinking more deeply about a question or problem related to the course. By writing about a
How to Write Literary Analysis
Literary analysis involves examining all the parts of a novel, play, short story, or poem—elements such as character, setting, tone, and imagery—and thinking about how the author uses those elements to create certain effects. A literary essay isn't a book review: you're not being asked whether or not you liked a book or whether you'd ...
5.2 Methods of Organizing Your Writing
Chronological Order. Chronological arrangement has the following purposes: To explain the history of an event or a topic; To tell a story or relate an experience; To explain how to do or to make something; To explain the steps in a process. Chronological order is used mostly in expository writing which is a form of writing that narrates ...
4.3 Organizing Your Writing
4.3 Organizing Your Writing. Learning Objectives. Understand how and why organizational techniques help writers and readers stay focused. Assess how and when to use chronological order to organize an essay. Recognize how and when to use order of importance to organize an essay. Determine how and when to use spatial order to organize an essay.
Organization and Structure
Whole-Essay Structure IMRAD. While organization varies across and within disciplines, usually based on the genre, publication venue, and other rhetorical considerations of the writing, a great deal of academic writing can be described by the acronym IMRAD (or IMRaD): Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion.
Organizing Your Writing
Exercise 3. On a separate sheet of paper, write a paragraph that discusses a passion of yours. Your passion could be music, a particular sport, filmmaking, and so on. Your paragraph should be built upon the reasons why you feel so strongly. Briefly discuss your reasons in the order of least to greatest importance.
Organizing an Essay
Organizing an Essay. Organizing ideas and information clearly and logically in an essay, so that readers will understand and be able to follow the writer's thinking, is an essential stage of the writing process, but one that often proves to be more difficult than it sounds. When people write, ideas tend to come out in whatever order they occur ...
Organizing Your Writing
Exercise 3. On a separate sheet of paper, write a paragraph that discusses a passion of yours. Your passion could be music, a particular sport, filmmaking, and so on. Your paragraph should be built upon the reasons why you feel so strongly. Briefly discuss your reasons in the order of least to greatest importance.
How to Organise an Essay
Basic Essay Organisation. The first things to organise are what you are going to say and in what order you are going to say those things. After this, it is a case of refining those things. You can start by separating all your text into three sections: introduction, main body, and conclusion.
Organizing an Essay
method 1: hierarchical outline. This method usually begins by taking notes. Start by collecting potential points, as well as useful quotations and paraphrases of quotations, consecutively. As you accumulate notes, identify key points and start to arrange those key points into an outline.
How to Write a Literature Review
Examples of literature reviews. Step 1 - Search for relevant literature. Step 2 - Evaluate and select sources. Step 3 - Identify themes, debates, and gaps. Step 4 - Outline your literature review's structure. Step 5 - Write your literature review.
4.2: The Writing Process for Literary Essays
The preceding categories suggest that writing is a linear process — that is, that you will follow these steps in the following order: prewriting→researching→outlining→drafting→revising→feedback→re-revising→publishing. The reality of the writing process, however, is that as you write you shuttle back and forth in these stages.
Organize
Methods of Organizing Writing. The three common methods of organizing writing are chronological order , spatial order, and order of importance. You need to keep these methods of organization in mind as you plan how to arrange the information you have gathered in an outline. An outline is a written plan that serves as a skeleton for the ...
Organizing an Essay
The same logic applies to writing an essay. When all the parts of an essay are in some sort of order, it is both easier for the writer to put the essay together and for the reader to understand the main ideas presented in the essay. ... Writers need paragraph breaks to organize their writing. A paragraph break indicates a change in focus, topic ...
Essay Structure Guide ⇒ How to Organize an Essay Well
A good conclusion will: Draw all the strands of your argument together. Evaluate the importance, usefulness, or relevance of your paper. Make a final comment or judgment about what you have written in the finished essay. Your conclusion is the last section and your opportunity to have the last word on the subject.
Organizing Your Literature: Spreadsheet Style
The beautiful thing about workflow and organization is that there is no right way to do it; you can customize anything. The headings of your spreadsheet are where you can make this your own. In my spreadsheet, I have: ID number (I'll come back to this) Year. Author (s) + Year. Title. APA Reference. Type of Resource.
Essay Writing: How to Organise Your Research
The basis of your research document is your rough essay plan. Turn each section of your plan into a heading under which you can record your research. For example, in the essay plan above, Topic 1 is 'Disease and demographic impact'. This will be a heading in your research document. As you research this topic, you will be able to separate ...
Our 15th Annual Summer Reading Contest
Our 15th Annual Summer Reading Contest. Students are invited to tell us what they're reading in The Times and why, this year in writing OR via a 90-second video. Contest dates: June 7 to Aug. 16. +.
The Trump Trial's Extraordinary Opening
That's how the first couple of days of the trial in the People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, Indictment No. 71543-2023, felt much of the time. Ordinary—despite being so ...
NPR editor Uri Berliner resigns with blast at new CEO
Uri Berliner resigned from NPR on Wednesday saying he could not work under the new CEO Katherine Maher. He cautioned that he did not support calls to defund NPR. NPR senior business editor Uri ...
Tips for Organizing Your Essay
Strategy #1: Decompose your thesis into paragraphs. A clear, arguable thesis will tell your readers where you are going to end up, but it can also help you figure out how to get them there. Put your thesis at the top of a blank page and then make a list of the points you will need to make to argue that thesis effectively.
Jamaica teen takes top prize in NYPD essay-writing contest
A Jamaica teen was honored by the NYPD at One Police Plaza this week for her essay-writing ability.. Tina Perumal, 18, bested 300 teens vying for an award in the Police Athletic League-NYPD annual ...
6 Common Leadership Styles
Much has been written about common leadership styles and how to identify the right style for you, whether it's transactional or transformational, bureaucratic or laissez-faire. But according to ...
How teachers started using ChatGPT to grade assignments
A new tool called Writable, which uses ChatGPT to help grade student writing assignments, is being offered widely to teachers in grades 3-12. Why it matters: Teachers have quietly used ChatGPT to grade papers since it first came out — but now schools are sanctioning and encouraging its use. Driving the news: Writable, which is billed as a ...
Gig workers are writing essays for AI to learn from
Companies are hiring highly educated gig workers to write training content for AI models. The shift toward more sophisticated trainers comes as tech giants scramble for new data sources. AI could ...

9.3 Organizing Your Writing

Chronological Order

Writing at Work

Order of Importance

Spatial Order

Key Takeaways

How to Organize an Essay

Essay Template and Sample Essay

Laying the Groundwork

Getting the Basics Down

Organizing the Essay

Revising the Plan

Expert Q&A

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4.3 Organizing Your Writing

Chronological Order

Connecting the Pieces: Writing at Work

Order of Importance

Spatial Order

Key Takeaways

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Organization and Structure

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

Whole-Essay Structure

Outlining & Reverse Outlining

Questions for Writing Outlines

Questions for Writing Reverse Outlines

Organizing at the sentence and paragraph level

Questions for Identifying and Evaluating Signposts

Masterlinks

SAMPLE ESSAY USING THE FIVE-PARAGRAPH MODEL

Document Actions

Organizing Your Writing

Learning Objectives

CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

WRITING AT WORK

ORDER OF IMPORTANCE

SPATIAL ORDER

Key Takeaways

Share This Book

How to Organise an Essay – A Comprehensive Guide & Examples

The Importance of Organisation of an Essay

Basic Essay Organisation

Different Patterns for the Organisation of an Essay

Chronological Organisation

Where is Chronological Organisation Used?

Specific Language Needed

Spatial Organisation

Climactic Order

When to Use Climactic Order

Topical Organisation

Comparing and Contrasting: Alternating and Block Methods

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Key Tips for Organising your Essay

Start your Essay with Simple Arguments

Get the Readers on your Side

Know your Audience

Define Technical Terms

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is referencing affected by the essay style I choose?

Are there fixed rules on which method of organising to use for certain subjects?

Do I have to provide a glossary of technical terms?

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Organizing an Essay

Some basic guidelines

Avoiding a common pitfall

What does an essay outline look like?

When should I begin putting together a plan?

How can I construct a usable plan?

method 1: hierarchical outline

method 2: the circle method

What is a reverse outline?

How much of my time should I put into planning?