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How to Organize Your Thoughts in Academic Writing


Welcome students! You can download 5 templates/outlines below to keep your essay organized, and watch a video with additional explanation here.



Writing an essay means capturing your main point and supporting it with both evidence and examples. But how do you keep it all organized? What comes first, second, third, and last—and how do you keep your reader from getting lost?


College students walking on campus

The solution is often using an outline or even template to keep your ideas in order—and your grade high. The 5 templates above can help you write any of these essays:

  • Argumentative

  • Cause and Effect

  • Compare and Contrast

  • Narrative



More Organization Tips


Without organization and structure, an essay can end up like just a list of ideas, quotes, and references. What we need is a way to present things for our reader—a plan for how to keep our ideas in a logical order. I call this underlying essay structure a "skeleton." It keeps the bones and cells of the essay organized into paragraphs that make sense—and it helps one idea lead to the next for our readers.


You may have been assigned a specific kind of essay. If so, you know what you need to include, but the order can still be difficult to decide on. Overall, here's what I suggest when choosing how to put ideas into a logical order for our readers:


  • Choose a skeleton that's based in logic—like cause/effect, problem/solution, etc. If your essay is cause/effect or problem/solution, you'll know the first part will be the cause or problem, and the second part can be the effect or solution. Check the downloadable templates included at the top of this article for examples!


  • When in doubt, organize ideas according to chronology or steps in a process. This is a logical way of thinking for all of us. Start with what happens first and go from there.


  • If you're writing to a specific reader (like with an email, for example), organize your ideas according to reader relevance. Start with what matters most to them, then second most, etc.



Organization Resources


Make sure you get these FREE resources to help you organize your essay:

  • 5 templates or outlines for organization — download at the top of this article

  • video explaining the outlines and sharing organizational advice — watch it here



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