One of the most common ways to start writing a paper is to start writing it. This is also one of the worst ways to start writing a paper.

To avoid sprawling prose, consider writing out your entire paper in an outline. I don’t mean to make an outline of your paper before you write it (though that’s a good tip too). I mean, more radically, to actually write out the paper, full sentences and all, in outline form.

Doing so will ensure that you’re putting in all the right information in all the right places because it makes it easy to see the function that any given sentence is performing (not the content of the sentence, but the kind of academic information it presents).

Writing in outline form also makes it easier to manipulate the order and arrangement of your ideas, which is a key aspect of revision.

Consider creating your outlines using my Aphorisms on Academic Information. Using that document and one of my various Aphorisms on Organization, you should be able to plug the content of your idea into the form of academic argumentation.

There are two kinds of outlines you should consider, a basic outline and a detailed outline.

A basic outline is the kind of outline that you are probably already familiar with. It offers, in short phrases and notes, a quick overview of the paper you plan to write: the topics to be addressed and the order in which you plan to address them. The organization of this outline will depend on the specific kind of paper you’re writing, but it will probably include some version of an introduction (which includes a “problem statement,” a “text statement,” and a “thesis statement”), a body for the paper (which lists the topics or evidence you plan to address), and a conclusion (which provides an overview of your argument and discusses the importance and implications of it).

In a basic outline, you’ll need to specify all the information pertinent to the major parts of the paper (introduction, body, and conclusion), as well as the sections and, if needed, the paragraphs within each of the sections of the body of the paper. A basic outline should include a working thesis statement written out in one or two sentences. Apart from that thesis, try to keep your items to five words or fewer. You’re not making points here; you’re only marking down the points that need to be made.

While you have probably done something similar to what I’m calling a “basic outline” before, what I call a “detailed outline” is probably not familiar to you. A detailed outline usually comes later in the writing process, and it is something that you will return to and recreate at a number of steps along the way to a finished paper. If a basic outline covers the ideas you’re addressing and the order in which you're addressing them, a detailed outline adds the claims you're making about those ideas using complete sentences.

That’s right, your outline will use complete sentences, but your complete sentences will be structured in outline form so that you can see and manipulate the structure of the paper, its parts, its sections, its paragraphs, and even its sentences.

To start a detailed outline, create a new basic outline, not a revision of your previous outline, but a new outline based on what the completely new paper you would write today would look like. Then, using complete sentences, and tagging your information with the appropriate category of academic information, outline the course of your proposed paper.

In a detailed outline, for introductory and concluding material, tag your information and then write out your sentences. For body paragraphs, I’ll usually tag them with “Assert,” and then use a bulleted list to work through evidence (all the various kinds: textual, historical, and citational) and analysis. I don’t specify what kind of evidence I’m presenting, nor do I even tag different sentences as “Evidence” or “Analysis,” because these categories often blend together. You’ll inevitably find the strategy and approach that works best for you and your writing habits.