Organizing and Connecting Ideas

Now that you have refined your topic a bit more, you can start organizing how your ideas will support your main idea or thesis. Start looking for connections as you develop a formal outline or roadmap for your paper. Having an outline and imagining how your paper will flow from one idea to the next or from one paragraph or one section to the next will help ensure your writing is clear and logical. You have already identified a topic and a working thesis, so now you can begin to refine this topic and further flush out your ideas. Ask questions like:

• What ideas do you need to discuss in your paper to support your main idea?
• How many supporting ideas are needed to comprehensively discuss your main idea?
• Do you need to separate an idea into two ideas to fully discuss it?
• Should you combine two ideas into one idea because they are focusing on the same thing?
• How are your ideas related?
• Which ideas need to be discussed first or later so that the writing flows?

After you have elaborated on your organizing ideas and made connections between them, you are ready to develop your outline!

Attribution statement

Content from this page was adapted, with editorial changes, from:

The Word on College Reading and Writing by Carol Burnell, Jaime Wood, Monique Babin, Susan Pesznecker, and Nicole Rosevear, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Download for free at: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/wrd/