500 words is not very long for a paper. An outline is not really that useful for a 500 word essay. (Hell, some of my answers are 500 words! 8^O) But think if you were writing 10,000 words. You couldn't just sit down and write a paper like that starting with 'Once upon a time. . . ' and ending '. . . and they lived happily ever after.' You'd want to do some planning. If you've never written a 10,000 word paper, you WILL. (Well, hopefully.)
So sit down and think about what it is you want to say. What are the main points you want to make? How do they fit together--like, which is first, how do you flow from one to the other? In a 500 word paper you might have two or three main points so it's not that big of a deal. How do you want to open and close?
The idea is that the better the outline is, the easier the paper is to write. Probably not true with a puny 500 word paper, but you get the idea.
When I was in school, outlines had Roman Numerals, then Capital Letters, then numbers, then small letters. That was a long time ago, you might have different rules now. But an outline would look like this:
I. Introduction
II This is point one.
..A. This sentence helps explain point one
..B. This sentence also.
....1. This helps explain B
III This is point two
..A Because I said so
..B Unless you don't believe me
....1. You don't? I'm hurt!
IV. This is the conclusion
You can't do indentation in Yahoo Answers, so I used periods instead of spaces.
The nice thing about an outline is that you don't have to do it linearly. You can work on one section, expand another section, look through it to see if any other places need work. This is much easier with a computer than it used to be with a typewriter. Plus, when you actually write the paper you can do it the same way.
