Assignment: Creating a Thesis and Outlining Your Essay Ideas

Outlining is a valuable tool for structuring your essay. It helps you organize your thoughts and guides you towards completing your paper successfully. Think of it as a roadmap to your final essay. You will draft your thesis statement and outline your ideas for your first research paper, which will involve applying a literary criticism approach to analyze one of the following stories (The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe, Recitatif by Toni Morrison.) Again the following stories have to be from below!

• "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe
• "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• "Recitatif" by Toni Morrison

The following elements should be included in your outline:

1. Title: It is a good practice to write the title of your paper as a reflection of your thesis statement.
2. Introduction: Typically, an introduction starts wide and narrows down to your specific topic, ending in the thesis. This is your opportunity to establish why readers might be curious about your general topic, catch their attention, or put your essay in context.
3. Thesis statement: Your introduction must finish with a clear, explicit thesis statement, that informs the readers exactly what your paper will be arguing. This sentence is placed at the end of the first paragraph.
4. Essay map: This element is a part of the thesis. It outlines the proofs (support) that will be used to prove the thesis.
5. Topic sentence: Your introduction should start with a sentence that tells the reader the general subject. This is best placed as the first sentence in the paper.
6. Concluding sentence: A conclusion sentence should wrap up your essay by restating the thesis statement and demonstrating how it was proved by the essay.