Organizing An Informative Essay: Basic Guidelines

Most educators agree that planning is a key to successfully writing any kind of assignment. Planning involves great organization of thoughts and ideas. This helps in keeping your content relevant and effective, making your paper strong and enjoyable to read. Here are some basic guidelines towards organizing your informative essay:

Get Your Ideas in Order

You’re going to have an easier time of structuring your informative essay if you get down as many ideas as possible early in the process. Take 20 to 30 minutes to brainstorm all you are going to want to bring up in your paper. Cluster related ideas to organize your creative session and select the best ideas (and the ones with the most evidence) to explore.

Set up your resume so that you dedicate a single paragraph to each of your major discussion points. It’s good to develop a draft thesis statement at this point, but it doesn’t have to be anywhere near to what the final one will look like. Just get things organized so that you can follow along as you write your first draft.

Identify Your Work Style

It’s generally a good idea to get your first draft written as quickly and as efficiently as possible. How you go about doing this, though, can vary. Many writers like to start from the introduction and write all the way through to their conclusion, while other writers like to start with the body paragraphs before returning to write the introduction. Either way is fine as long as you get started.

Some writers like stopping to make corrections when they make them in their first draft. This isn’t recommended if you want to be efficient. All writers should go through a process of revising, editing, and proofreading their content – all of which provide ample opportunities to make those corrections.

Prepare to Bring Up Ideas

You should always use your outline when writing your drafts, but it is also a good idea to bring out your brainstorming notes for reference as well. This will help you sort out material that pops up in your mind as you are deep in a moment of creativity. It’s not good to insert just anything that comes to mind since this would be counter-productive to the organization stage you went through earlier, but you can always consider each idea and determine whether it’s appropriate to the topic you are covering in any one paragraph.