Pre-writing lays the foundation for your paper. The process begins with establishing the purpose of the paper, the type of writing and your audience. You must decide on your main argument and consider who is going to read the paper. Writing a paper for a college audience is different than writing for a younger audience. Research is the next stage of pre-writing. Find references, write a reference list and collect evidence for your paper. Writing an outline might follow research, or you might begin writing down ideas and quotes in a research outline.
An outline lists the main points and subpoints of a paper. As you read through your reference material, you can either take notes or create a research outline that places supporting evidence and quotes under their related topics. Another option is to wait until after you finish your research and have a complete picture in your head of what to say. Write a brief or detailed outline using your research notes. A basic outline structure includes a brief introduction, thesis, background, three pieces of evidence, conclusion and references.
A professor might require a formal outline with a paper. This type of outline acts as a guide to your paper by laying out the main points and subpoints for your readers. Write this outline after you complete your paper. Some people write formal outlines as sentence outlines. These outlines are long and use complete sentences to clearly express the points of the outline. Topic outlines are the second type of formal outlines. Topic outlines are brief and use shorter phrases. Both types of formal outlines use Roman characters instead of the bullets or dashes found in informal outlines.
A fiction writer might do pre-writing before starting a project to flush out the plot, characters and settings. An author might also create a storyboard for a play or movie as a graphic representation of the storyline. A storyboard is an outline with pictures. After an author writes a draft, he might then revise the original outline before writing a new draft. Fiction writers might also use outlines for individual scenes before or after the pre-writing stage. Outlines are optional for fiction.