MIT's writing process for students recommends an outline before writing.

ONE OF THE most respected and revered universities in the whole world, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is consistently ranked as the top one or two universities across the whole world every year.

In this series dubbed "The Writing Process" from MIT's Global Studies and Languages program, the institution's course instructors lay out how one may approach expository writing, covering the process in distinct stages.

Besides having produced numerous notable scholars and academics, MIT has also shipped dozens of graduates from its academic programs who have gone on to be world leaders, presidents and Nobel Prize winners.

The Main Takeaway

Each segment of this series of resources help guide the reader in what to do along each step of the way when it comes to writing an expository essay or piece.

The result is an end-to-end overview of what to expect as well as what to do when faced with the task of writing an academic paper or student essay.

Obstacles and Difficulties

Without knowing how to methodically approach the task of writing an essay or paper, it's hard to produce results of a similar, high quality on a consistent basis. Having a rough guide for how to go about doing this can help immensely in terms of having a roadmap to follow in order to achieve the end goal.

Using an Outline

After having generated your ideas for the paper you're working on by brainstorming or mapping them out, MIT here advocates using a detailed outline to structure your writing, hierarchically laying out your points and ideas.

A key point to note that is when creating the outline, it isn't necessary to spell each point out in a full sentence, at this juncture. However, care should be paid to including an adequate amount of verbs in the description of your idea, so as to sufficiently describe the idea in full, without making it too ambiguous for further down in the process.

The result of the outline should be a structure that contains every point you intend to cover in your final piece, which from you can then continue to work on by working on a draft, revising and finally, editing the final work.