REVIEW BEFORE YOU BEGIN YOUR OUTLINE.
After you find all your information for your report, you need to "clean your room."
Think of it this way. When you clean up your room, you organize. You put things where they belong. You need to do the same thing with the information for your report. The way that you organize that information is to write an outline.
An outline is a plan that will help you arrange facts in proper order. An outline is made up of main ideas and less important ideas. These are called main headings and subheadings.
Let's look at how Ted wrote his outline.
Ted's questions were:
1. What is a harvester ant?
2. Do harvester ants have a queen?
3. How are new ant colonies formed?
Ted took his questions and turned each one into a main heading. Notice that each important word is capitalized.
I. The Harvester Ant
II. The Harvester Queen
III. The New Colony
Next, Ted used his notes to decide what the subheadings would be. There should always be at least two subheadings for each main heading. Notice only the first word in a subheading is capitalized.
I. The Harvester Ant
A. What it looks like
B. What it does
II. The Harvester Queen
A. Workers care for her
B. She lays eggs
III. The New Colony
A. Mating
B. Nesting
Ted's outline is like a "skeleton" for his report. It provides the "bones" needed to give the report support. Notice he did not use complete sentence so no punctuation is needed at the end of each point. Follow this example when you complete your outline for your paper. :)