Organization

Organize your argument into thematic sections. The best way of doing this is often to read over all of your notes and decide how you can logically divide them up. Depending on your topic, you might, for instance, divide up your material according to broad categories, such as social circumstances, political decisions, and economic conditions. If you are writing a review, you might divide up your argument into separate sections on the author's use of evidence, attention to alternative arguments, and general success at proving his or her thesis. These are just suggestions. The number of alternative organizational structures for any given topic is limitless. The most important thing is to make an outline before you begin writing so that one bit of information will logically flow into another, and so that you don't end up repeating yourself or making a huge leap from one point to another. Ask yourself what arguments you want to make and how they relate to one another. Then decide what evidence you have to support each point and what the most effective order for presenting these bits of information would be.

Organize your paper in paragraphs. Each paragraph should make a single point or have a single theme, which you should make clear in a topic sentence. The topic sentence is generally, but not always, the first sentence of the paragraph. You can make several subsidiary points in your paragraph, but everything should be thematically related to your topic sentence. A good topic sentence also makes clear how the argument in this paragraph relates to the point of the previous paragraph. This is a form of signposting, as described above. Each sentence and each paragraph should flow logically one to another.