Essay Outline Generator

About the Essay Outline Generator

Turn your own points into a clear, numbered outline before you start writing. Pick one of ten guided templates — five-paragraph, argumentative, compare-and-contrast (point by point or in blocks), cause-and-effect, research paper (IMRaD), lab report, literature review, statement of purpose, college application essay and the three-question UCAS personal statement — and every section asks for the kinds of point it needs: a hook and background for the introduction, a topic sentence, evidence and explanation for each body paragraph, a fair counterargument, the gap a study fills.

Give the word limit and the outline shares it out: each section shows roughly how many words it should get, rounded so that the parts add up to the limit exactly. With a pass, download the outline as an editable Word file with real outline numbering, as a PDF or as Markdown, copy it, or print it as a planning sheet. It never writes the essay for you: everything in the outline is in your own words.

Common uses

• Planning a school or college essay before writing the first draft.
• Splitting a word limit between sections, so the introduction does not take half the essay.
• Structuring a research paper, lab report or literature review in the order courses and journals expect.
• Organising your own facts for a statement of purpose, a college essay or a UCAS personal statement.
• Teachers printing a template with blanks as a planning sheet for a class.

The ten templates

• Five-paragraph essay: an introduction (hook, background, thesis, road map), three body paragraphs (topic sentence, evidence, explanation, transition) and a conclusion. Choose two to five body paragraphs if your assignment asks for another number.
• Argumentative essay: an introduction ending in your claim, two to five reasons with their evidence and the reasoning that links them, a counterargument with your rebuttal, and a conclusion with a call to action.
• Compare-and-contrast essay: point by point (each body paragraph compares both subjects on one point) or block (all about one subject, then the same points about the other), with the prompts named after your two subjects.
• Cause-and-effect essay: several causes of one effect, several effects of one cause, or a chain in which each event leads to the next.
• Research paper (IMRaD): abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion, conclusion, references and appendices. IMRaD is the usual structure of an original research article in the ICMJE Recommendations.
• Lab report: background theory, aim and hypothesis, materials and methods (with the variables and safety), results, a discussion of errors and improvements, and the answer to the aim.
• Literature review: an introduction with the scope and focus, sections by theme, period or method (key sources, how they relate, your evaluation), the gaps, and a conclusion.
• Statement of purpose: opening, academic background, research and work experience, why this programme, career goals and closing.
• College application essay: one story in five moves — the opening moment, context, the challenge, reflection and looking forward.
• UCAS personal statement: UCAS’s three questions, which share 4,000 characters (spaces count) with at least 350 characters for each answer, as UCAS explains.

How the word budget is worked out

Every section has a share of the limit. The shares of the sections inside the limit are scaled to fill it, so Make 100% only tidies the numbers and never changes the proportions. The limit is multiplied by each share and rounded down to whole fives (tens from 2,000 words, single words below 300); the words left over then go, one step at a time, to the sections that lost most in the rounding. So the parts always add up to the limit.

A share of 0% keeps a section outside the limit. The research paper and lab report templates start with the abstract, references and appendices outside it: abstracts usually have a word limit of their own, and the ICMJE asks authors for a word count of the main text that leaves out the abstract and the references.

What makes a good outline

Purdue OWL names four qualities of an effective outline: parallelism (entries at the same level are written the same way, for example all starting with a verb), coordination (entries at the same level are equally important), subordination (each heading is more general than the points under it) and division (a heading that is split has at least two parts). The checks above the outline point out any heading with a single sub-point.

The outline is numbered in either of two formats Purdue OWL describes: alphanumeric — Roman numerals, capital letters, numbers, small letters, then (1) and (a) — or decimal, here 1., 1.1 and 1.1.1.

Limitations

• It arranges your points; it does not write sentences, research a topic or judge whether an argument works.
• The shares are starting points, not rules: follow your teacher’s, course’s or journal’s instructions where they differ.
• Up to 150 points in a box, nested up to four levels deep. One outline is kept, in this browser.
• For applications, check each university’s own prompts and limits. UCAS’s figures are built in; other limits are yours to type.
• Markdown and plain text carry the outline’s numbers as text; only the Word file renumbers itself when you edit it. The PDF prints Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Vietnamese and Devanagari letters; use the Word file for other scripts.

Privacy

Your outline stays in your browser: it is kept in this browser’s storage so that it is still there when you come back, and nothing is uploaded. Start over clears it.