Knowing How To Outline

Posted by qpen on August 18, 2009

Previously, we discussed Keeping an Idea Book and Writing In A Journal FreeWriting, Brainstorming, Mapping, Incubation, and Shaping and Grouping Ideas and Topic Sentences, this time we will be discussing:

Knowing How To Outline

Many writers find outlining a useful planning strategy. If you are working from an outline and make changes in organization as you write, be sure to revise your outline at the end.

An outline helps pull together the results of gathering and ordering ideas and preparing your work. It also provides a visual checklist for your formal or informal outline.

Some writers always use outlines, others prefer not to. Writers who do like outlines use them at various points in their writing process.

For example:

They may use them before drafting
They may use them to arrange material
They may use them during drafting
Or to keep track of evolving material
Or while revising to check the logic of an early draft’s organization

Writers who use outlines find that they can clearly reveal flaws such as:

Missing information
Undesirable repetition
Or other digressions from their topic

Outlines can come in different formats:

Formal outlines
Informal outlines

Informal Outline:

Outlining using your computer, you can quickly read what you have written, put a symbol near what seems most important-then look over the parts and copy them to your text so you can see them grouped together.

You can shuffle them into several different orders such as:

Does it matter which part comes first, second, third, and so on”
Are the parts equally important, or do some seem subordinate to others?

Indenting the subordinate parts to make a rough outline will help tremendously.

Formal Outline

A formal outline follows conventions concerning content and format. The conventions are designed to display material so that relationships among ideas are clear and so that the content is orderly.

A formal outline can be a Topic Outline or a Sentence Outline.

Each item in a Topic Outline is a word or phrase

Each item in a Sentence Outline is a complete sentence.

Formal Outlines never mix the two.

Many writers who use formal outlines find that a sentence outline brings them closer to drafting than a topic outline does.

For example: A topic outline carries less information with the item “Gathering Information” than does a sentence outline with the corresponding term “Gathering information is the first step to being well prepared.”

Formal Outline Guidelines:

1. Numbers, letters, and indentations signal groupings and levels of importance

2. Each level has more than one entry

3. All subdivisions are at the same level of generality

4. Headings do not overlap

5. Entries are grammatically parallel

6. Only the first word of each entry and proper nouns are capitalized

7. Periods and each sentence in a Sentence Outline but not the items in a Topic Outline

8. The introductory and concluding paragraphs are omitted

Next time we will be discussing: Drafting and Revising

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