Improve your Writing (Organisation and Outlining)

Dive right in... maybe not just yet. Often we go straight into our writing and spam out words after words. Keep writing sentence after sentence, but have you ever stopped and took a real good look at what you wrote?

Image credit

I was taught a principle, 'if you don't have a plan, you are planning to fail'. Having a organised outline can be a huge benefit to you as a writer. Helps you edit your writing and lay it out smoothly. Bestselling Author Jeffery Deaver once said: “The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that’s the easy part.”

Image credit

When organising things you can do them any way you want and most people organise things different. If you take fruit for an example, you can organise them in many different ways.
From favourite to least
Alphabetical order
Colour
Size
Each way tells us something different, so make sure you have your writing organised in a way that it tells your reader what you want to get across to them.

When organising your paper, make it flexible, this will help if you decide on changing your mind or want to go in a different direction. Make sure that you have all the relevant information before you start organising your paper and that you know what the papers purpose is.

All different types of papers will have different structures, it will all be based on what your centre idea is and how you base your writing around it. How you support your statement and main idea should be well organised as you don't want to confuse your reader by you jumping from one statement to the next. A great flow is required to ensure your reader gets the full value from your writing.

When starting your writing use headings and sub-headings to keep you on track. This is really easy if you have a mind map and other lists or labels attached to ideas and statements you want to use. After you have written your paper you can always remove these headings if you choose to.

Having a proper organised paper really helps when you want to change your thesis a little, remember that is easier to edit one small line than try reconnect each statement to each other again. This will also make things a lot less confusing to your readers.

Image credit

Do not confuse yourself with your outline, keep it simple. Also remember that your outline is a direct reflection on your writing, the more writing you have, or the more intense the topic is, the more you would like to put into your outline. Be very clear and specific in your outline on what you want and where you want it, this will reflect in your writing.

Image credit
Keep writing is the key to it all.

*Just on a little side note for self improvement. I will be doing pushups, situps and squats for the amount of $$$ I earn on this post and will give a short feedback every day at the end of each post. This will be split in equally between all 3. Any not done will carry onto the next day. *