Drugs and Police Corruption

Paper Outline

Introduction

Essay outlines provide structure and guidance for writers as they begin the drafting process. An outline should briefly summarize the intended content of your essay and organize that content in a sensible, coherent manner. Knowing how to outline is an important skill for students, since instructors will usually require students to turn in outlines before submitting their papers.

Students should ensure that they read the guidelines for their outline assignment carefully. Highlight or underline important words and phrases in the instructions. Make sure that you fully understand what the professor is asking you to do before you begin your outline. Ask for clarification if anything seems vague or confusing.

It is important that students identify the purpose of their paper. For this paper, theprimary purpose is to enlighten/inform the reader about the subject of the paper.

Students should develop a thesis for their paper Once you have developed your ideas and considered your purpose and audience, you should be ready to write a thesis statement.Effective thesis statements express the main focus of a paper and state an arguable claim. A thesis should not be more than one sentence in length.

• Make sure your thesis is arguable. Do not state facts or matters of taste. For example, something like “George Washington was the first president of the United States,” would not be a good thesis because it states a fact. Likewise, “Die Hard is a great movie,” would not work because it expresses a matter of taste.
• Make sure your thesis provides enough detail. In other words, avoid simply saying that something is “good” or “effective” and say what specifically makes it “good” or “effective.”

Essay Outline: General

Start with outlining your introduction. Write a sentence about your topic and introduce your thesis. You can also mention an essay hook here – a sentence you’ll use to make the audience interested in reading your work.

Outline your essay body: write down a topic sentence for each paragraph, provide supporting evidence you’ll use when writing, and mention how they’ll relate to the topic and your thesis. The more details you outline, the easier it will be to organize all the thoughts while writing.

Also, you can write a transition sentence for each paragraph so it would be faster to structure and band all arguments.

Finally, outline your essay conclusion. Restate your thesis and write a concluding statement, aka a sentence addressing the importance of your thesis and proposing solutions to the problem you addressed in the essay.

For this paper, I want students to use the alphanumeric format of an essay outline. See below for an example: