The Art of Outlining Your Paper
What is an Outline?
An outline is a list or a collection of your thoughts for your paper. It generally describes your article but not in detail and plans how you are going to write the paper. It is like a draft, you can put whatever you want to write in it, including your contentions, the evidence supporting your contentions.
You may also write how you should approach each section—vivid or rigorous—and how long you intend to write, 4 lines or a whole page. In all, it gives you a general look at your paper without fully writing it down.
You can imagine what your article will be like when seeing the outline. After the outline is finished, the only thing you need to do is to fill in the details to make it a paragraph and thread them with conjunctive words.
There is not a specific style for your outline since it only serves your writing but not the readers’ reading. However, in most cases, a list is better than boring and lengthy paragraphs.
Why Should We Write an Outline?
It seems writing an outline is an extra burden on your writing assignments, but that’s not the case. Here’s why outlining is essential:
1. Makes Your Writing More Logical
Academic writing needs to be logical with a consistent thread, while our brain is creative and random. You may first think of the most important idea, which should be at the bottom of your paper.
If you write without an outline, your contentions may be arranged in a bad order. Even if you rearrange it, the relationship between your paragraphs is not that clear for lack of response between paragraphs. Making up these things afterward will break your thread and waste a lot of time.
2. Stores Creative But Fleeting Ideas
According to a research program, your brain can generate 6,000-60,000 ideas in a day. About 80% is meaningless and repeated but over 100 of them are meaningful and creative.
It takes you several days to write the final paper with only a few contentions. It’s quite possible to think of some creative ideas on the part you haven’t started yet, such as how to organize the examples, what terms you need to explain, and even more contentions when you are writing. Without an outline, you will miss these precious thoughts.
3. Helps Check if Ideas Fit Your Claim
Some arguments seem good when you see them separately. However, these may have problems after you write other arguments.
The argument may be too comprehensive to write in a paragraph with so many examples, or repeats some part of the more creative argument you intend to write afterward. With an outline you can check before you write it into a paragraph, minimize the useless efforts of writing a long paragraph and delete it.
How to Make an Effective Outline
In order to make an outline, you should try to follow these steps:
Step 1: Make Preparations
You have to make basic researches to get evidence for academic writing or brainstorm and come up with ideas for creative writing. The more content you prepare at the beginning, the smoother the rest of the writing process will go.
Step 2: Organize Information
Organize the information you have collected in groups with separate topics. Most of the time, one topic group corresponds to one specific paragraph.
Step 3: Find the Best Order
Try to find out the best order to discuss these topics. You can take logical factors like requirement of background information, requirement to read the following paragraph, cause and effect, level of importance and time into account.
It can make the process smoother, but it will be fine to move things around later if you find somewhere unsuitable.
Step 4: Fill in Details
Fill in details like quotes and references to sources to make the writing of the first draft more efficient without a complicated thing to worry about.
Step 5: Revise and Compare
Make revisions and comparisons between different sections. You may be able to figure out some problems like lack of supporting evidence or logical confusion and resolve them before formally starting to write the first draft.
Common Outline Formats
As for the format, there’s no mandatory requirements, but it should be properly indented. Two common examples are as follows: