Organising an outline chronologically
Many essays discuss a sequence of events that happened over a period of time. Almost always, the order that events are discussed in the essay should be the same as the order that they happened in real life. When doing the outline for the essay, you’d structure it so that the events were ordered appropriately.
Essay title
Introduction
1st event or thing to occur
2nd event or thing to occur
...
Last event or thing to occur
Conclusion
For instance, an essay might discuss the evolution of dinosaurs over the entire time period they were around. The age of the dinosaurs is called the Mesozoic, and can be divided into three major time periods - the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. The outline therefore, might look like this:
The Age of the Dinosaurs
Introduction
Triassic
Archosaurs
First primitive dinosaurs
Jurassic
Start of the reign of the dinosaurs
The huge dinosaurs
Cretaceous
Most highly evolved dinosaurs
Extinction
Conclusion
Of course, you can also put subheadings like we’ve done here into the essay outline. In this outline, we have three major topic headlines - one for each of the major time periods, in chronological order. Then, under each major heading, we have subtopics which are relevant to the particular time associated with the major heading. For instance, for the last period of the dinosaurs - the Cretaceous - one of the subheadings is ‘extinction’, which is what happened to the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period.
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