Essay Glossary

Outline

A good way to see how a dead body was positioned before it was carted off to the city morgue.

An outline is also a list of all the points you will include in an essay, arranged in the order in which you will write them. Take the ideas you came up with during your brainstorming session. Save the good ones and list them separately in your outline. The bad ones you can throw right into the trash. Unless they’re made of plastic or glass, in which case, please recycle.

A comprehensive outline will save you tons of time when you’re writing—no more staring at a blinking cursor and no more tapping your pen against a blank sheet of paper, because you already know what you’re going to say. And no, that cursor is not blinking at you because it thinks you’re cute. Man, you are really full of yourself.