When you are thinking about an essay or processing it in your head, ideas can come rapidly and randomly. When you’re planning your writing assignment, you need to put your ideas in a logical order so that your intended reader can follow your thinking. An organizer helps you as well. It serves as a map that keeps you on track and demonstrates to your reader that there is an overall order to your ideas.
✓ Don’t just jump into writing. Planning beforehand is crucial!
✓ Use a planner or organizer that matches your learning preference. Some people like sequential planners; others prefer visual or graphic organizers that are both brainstorming and outlining tools.
✓ Use the "Talk Test": Discuss your ideas with someone else. Early feedback can save you major revisions later on. Just hearing yourself talk through your ideas is often a good indicator of how confident you are at this stage of the writing process.
Use this outline template to plan your essay.
Use this tip sheet for help deciding which graphic organizer best suits your needs.
Use this template to create fishbone diagrams.
Use this template to create a two-circle Venn diagram.
Watch this video (The Learning Portal Ontario, 2023) to learn more about types of graphic organizers and when they are useful. You can also download the text via the link below:
Check out this video by Writing Support Specialist Claire Pienaar (2021) about creating outlines.
Essay outlines are the skeleton of an essay. They contain the most important information, and can help you organized your ideas. An outline acts as a guide for writing you essay,
Writing an outline will help you organize the ideas for your essay. Also, it provides a condensed look at the essay, which is useful in helping you stay on track when the essay is being written. In addition, you can more easily ensure that the subpoints always relate back to the thesis.
There are two types of essay outlines:
All outlines should include an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Below is a brief summary of what is needed in the different parts:
Topic/title: The Advantages of Receiving Tutoring
General statement/attention getter: Attract the audience to read on; introduce the topic.
Everyone has required the help of another person at some point in life.
Connecting information: Link the general statement to the thesis.
For example, students often require the help of classmates, teachers, or other individuals.
Thesis: Create an arguable thesis (i.e., do not state a fact, such as “Seneca has a tutoring centre.”) Include your main points in the thesis sentence. Make sure the thesis is neither too broad, nor too narrow.
Tutoring provides an excellent source of help for students as it allows them to learn on a one-on-one basis, enables them to gain new strategies to tackle specific problems, and helps reinforce classroom concepts.
Restate thesis in different words with your three points.
Tutoring can help students further their understanding of concepts learned from class by working with tutors one-on-one, learning new strategies, and reinforcing ideas.
General or memorable statement.
Remember, learning is not a solitary journey, so do not be afraid to ask for help.
Graphic organizers are great tools for learners who have strong visual preferences or who have strong visual memories. While we are treating them as pre-writing tools, they also make good note-taking templates for the right type of learner, since they help a reader to consolidate print-heavy information from another source— for example, a textbook— into a visual format.
The type of graphic organizer that you use will depend on what you want to do. You can use an organizer for the following reasons:
Brainstorming is the process of creative thinking to generate ideas. Mind maps or cluster diagrams are useful tools for brainstorming. They can help you branch out from an idea or subject to other, related ideas or components.
Mind mapping websites:
Comparing and contrasting two or more things can help you better understand ideas. This technique involves examining how things are similar and how they differ from each other. Examples of graphic organizers for comparing/contrasting are Matrix diagrams and Venn diagrams.
The Matrix Organizer helps you to organize your research findings based on similar points of comparison and enables you to note significant differences.
The Venn diagram uses overlapping circles to categorize the similarities and differences of two or more things, such as two articles on the same subject.
Using a graphic organizer can help you analyze the causes of events or solutions to problems. The Fishbone Diagram can be used to organize writing tasks that focus on cause and effect (with the cause above and the effect below) or problems and solutions.
Unless otherwise stated, the material in this guide is from the Learning Portal created by College Libraries Ontario. Content has been adapted for the NWP Learning Commons in June 2021. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY NC SA 4.0 International License.
All icons on these pages are from The Noun Project. See individual icons for creator attribution.