Final answer:
An outline is a framework that helps you organize your major claims, reasoning, supporting details, and evidence. It provides a structure for your essay and helps you see how different ideas relate to one another.
Step-by-step explanation:
An outline is a framework that helps you organize your major claims, reasoning, supporting details, and evidence. It provides a structure for your essay and helps you see how different ideas relate to one another. By sketching out the broad outline of your ideas, you can find the most logical progression for your paper.
When outlining, you can use major or minor topics to structure your paper. Major topics can represent the main ideas or arguments of your essay, while minor topics can represent supporting points or evidence. For example, in an essay about the effects of climate change, major topics could include the causes of climate change and its impact on ecosystems, while minor topics could include specific examples or case studies.