Determine the purpose of your paper or speech. Focus your thoughts and create logical arguments. Identify the audience for your material, which will also help narrow your focus. Develop a thesis statement, or the main idea, you wish to communicate in your presentation.
Brainstorm the content of your paper or speech. Compose a list of all the ideas you wish to explore. Once you have compiled a list, begin to group related ideas.
Discover a logical order for the ideas you have grouped together. Such an order might run from general ideas to specific or from abstract ideas to concrete. You might also organize the ideas chronologically, if your content has a narrative form.
Compose main and subheadings for the material you have organized. A commonly recognized format for professional outlines uses Roman numerals for the main headings, capitalized letters for the subheads, Arabic numerals and finally lowercase letters for any further headings. Professional outlines are usually parallel, meaning each heading and subheading should have analogous structure and the material should have similiar significance. If the first heading is a noun, the second one should be. too. Check to make sure each heading is divided into two parts. If you have a subheading "A," you should also have at least a "B" subheading, as well.