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Prewriting Organizing Your ideas
After collecting your details, you should organize all of your ideas in the order that you want them to appear in your essay. You can form an outline to do this. (See page 49.)
Another way is to create an organized list to arrange your ideas for writing, just as the writer of the sample essay did. Her list combines the causes of the problem and possible solutions. (The solutions are in italics.) Each cause became a separate paragraph in her essay.
Organized List
Problem: Deforestation of Amazon rainforest
Cause 1: Rainforest is becoming grazing land.
— high demand for beef and leather
— thousands of species replaced by one: cattle
— instead of absorbing greenhouse gases, the land generates it with methane
— better land-management policies