Successful use of research in writing includes properly incorporating the evidence, honestly crediting the sources, and building an outline that lays out the evidence systematically to support your thesis statement. An outline is meant to help you establish a structure for a paper that you are going to write. It is a way for you to demonstrate the main argument (thesis), main points (topic sentences), and main pieces of evidence that you are going to present in a paper before actually writing the paper. Additionally, one of the essential purposes of an outline is to convey the connection between the thesis and each of the topic sentences, clearly (Ashford University, 2013).