4 Great Suggestions on How to Organize a Long Essay

Organizing your essay is one of the most important elements of essay writing. If you need to write a long essay, it is necessary to arrange all the information so as to make your paper as detailed as possible, and to ensure nothing important is lost. Organizing your essay before you get to the writing stage will save you a lot of time during the writing process. Creating your own organizational scheme is also imperative. Use something that works for you personally. Here are five great suggestions on how you can organize your long essay.

  1. Use index cards.
  2. This method works well for people who are tactile-oriented. Write all your points on the index cards. Rearrange them to find the order that will make your paper flow well. When you arrange all the cards, you will see whether you have all the necessary information, and whether you will need to get rid of some cards that won’t be necessary for your research. You may use both white and colored cards. Write an idea on a card of a particular color, and all the supporting ideas on white cards that you will place under it.

  3. Use flow-charts.
  4. This method works better for visual learners. Using this method, you put together your ideas using color-coding. The benefit of flow-charts is that you will see all your ideas at once, and realize how they all fit together. For long essays you may sometimes need to create several charts.

  5. Write your essay on the PC.
  6. This method is great if you need to move things around and change them. You can do this as many times as necessary, without wasting paper. When doing research, write out all the points in a single file; you can simply copy and paste them from different sources. After that, it is easy to rearrange your points in order to make your paper flow smoothly. If you don’t mind staying at your computer throughout the whole process of writing, then this method will work great for you.

  7. Apply the circle method.
  8. This method allows you to see all your points on a single page. When you have an idea, write it down and make a circle around it. Connect the circles containing ideas that support each other. A big advantage of this system is that you can see right away how things are connected to each other. 

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