How to Organise your Thoughts for Writing an Essay

Essential Steps to Organise Your Thoughts in Essay Writing

Here are the steps that you can follow to organise your thoughts while writing your essay: 

Step 1: Planning the Organisation of your Essay

While planning may look like a very complicated task, it is not. It is simply creating a rough sketch in mind, or better, on paper, to follow for writing the final essay. Some of the ways of planning your essay are:

1. Mind Map:

A mind map is a graphical chart with a pivotal idea in the centre and sub-ideas around it that demonstrate the related thoughts. Here’s how you can make a mind map when writing your essay: 

• Write the topic of the essay or the focal phrase in the centre and let loose. 
• Write down the relevant ideas that come to your mind. 
• Do not inhibit your mind from writing any related idea or thought because it is not the final draft and is open to editing. 
• Continue adding thoughts to the map until no related thought is left in your mind. 
• Let your brain think whatever it wants, and write it down. 
• Once you write down the ideas, read all of them one by one. 
• Flesh out the ideas you may not want to include and mingle the repeating ideas. 
• Now link each of the ideas to the main idea and decide if you should write a separate paragraph for each idea. 
• Assemble multiple ideas into groups and write paragraphs for each group, or so on.

Mindmap Example:

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2. Freewriting

Freewriting is a writing technique on a subject matter without thinking of the grammatical and other language considerations. 

The writer writes on the main idea continuously and thus can express every thought that has been revolving around his head. The advantage of freewriting is that it helps writers produce creative and raw thoughts. 

Once you are done freewriting, review the draft and point out the main ideas that you would like to include in your essay. It will help you find out the valuable arguments and examples you should use in the essay and omit unnecessary details.

Choose between a mind map and freewriting, and move ahead to the next step.

Step 2: Create an Outline for Your Essay

Once you have created the mind map, now is the time to make an outline. An outline is a strategy that you have to follow to write your essay. It will provide you with a clear vision for drafting your essay. It contains the subtitles of the main idea and its other list of examples, arguments, or details. 

Based on the selected ideas from the mind map that you will use to formulate your essay, you will create an outline for structuring your essay. Here is an essay outline format:

Let’s say, from the format, you will begin with an introduction for the essay, write the second paragraph revolving around the first idea, then write the third paragraph with the second idea, and it will go on till the fourth idea and end with a concluding paragraph.

Having an outline in hand makes it easier to create a well-organised and structured essay than without an outline.

3 Different Methods of Organising Your Essay

Here are the three primary methods of organising your essay:

Method 1: Chronological Order

It is a pattern of sequencing in the order of occurrence in time. Therefore, it is also referred to as the time order. It orders events from the first to the last. This order is used to explain events, history, or a topic. 

It is also a suitable order to describe the steps of something and explain how to do or make something. So, chronological order is used to organise your thoughts if:

•  You are describing a series of events
•  Explaining something
• Listing details
• Discussing a process

Therefore, this order is used for narrative essays, descriptive essays, process essays, and explanatory essays. 

You can also use this order to describe a thing by describing the first feature, the second feature, the third, and so on until the last. The introduction in this order should indicate the order or gist of the information that you will provide in the essay.

EXAMPLE: 

When writing an essay about an event, you will use this mind map to make your outline:

Method 2: Order of Importance

The second type of order that you can use to organise your thoughts for writing the essay is the order of importance. Remember the rule Put First Thing First? That is what this order solicits you to do. 

You can use this order for writing an argumentative essay, a persuasive essay, and a descriptive essay. In all these essays, you will create an outline of the ideas, starting from the most important detail to the least important detail of the main idea.

EXAMPLE:

However, it is not important for this order to range from most important to the least, and it can go the other way around, such as: 

Method 3: Problem-Solution Order

The problem-solution order is the order of sequencing your ideas in a way that each problem is addressed with its solution. This is an ideal order of organising your thoughts for a cause and effect essay. 

While using this order, you will mention each cause with its effect/s in each paragraph. You can see this in the given example: 

EXAMPLE: 

The introduction will indicate all the information that you will discuss in your essay. The next paragraph will discuss the problem and its possible solution. It will follow the same pattern for each paragraph until the last problem and end with the conclusion paragraph.

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