Outlines

Why outline? Why not just let the words flow directly from your mind onto the page? 

Outlining is a way to organize your thoughts and your writing. Without an outline, a point that makes perfect sense to you might become a blurry, jumbled mess to your readers. Think of your essay as a jigsaw puzzle. It is up to you, not your reader, to put the pieces together to create a complete picture.  

1. What is an outline? 
   1. An outline is a tool for putting information in order and organizing main points and details. 
   2. An outline can be either formal or informal, based on precisely how organized you want to be. 
      1. A formal outline has a prescribed numbering and lettering system. It contains headings and subdivisions. 
      2. An informal outline is used most often in the preliminary planning stages of paper writing. It is a strategy for grouping together topics and details without following a prescribed system. 
2. Why outline? 
   1. Outlining helps you herd your thoughts into one corral. 
      1. It organizes information and ideas before the paper is written. In other words, it prevents you from forgetting to add important information until later in the paper (as in, "Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention . . ."). 
      2. It creats coherence throughout your paper. You won't go skipping happily about from one point to the next without explanations or any semblance of an organized pattern. 
      3. It prevents you from losing sight of your thesis or changing your point of view halfway throught the paper. Thus, you won't leave your reader wondering if you had anything important to say.
          
   2. Outlining helps you find strong and weak areas in your research. 
      1. It reveals imbalances and inadequately developed topics. 
      2. It tells you if you've wandered off aimlessly into a sidebar that holds no interest to your reader and contains no information of value (but I digress). 
      3. It forces you to remain relatively reasonable and logical within the scope of your essay. Outlining will reveal which of your points is insupportable by evidence that is understandable to your reader. 
      4. It reveals which topics and details are unnecessary within your paper. Outlines separate the junk from the good stuff.
   3. Outlining stimulates more thought about your thesis. 
      1. By revealing strong and weak points, outlining may generate new ideas about your thesis. 
      2. Outlining forces you to rethink every topic and detail in your paper. It allows you to say thumbs-up or thumbs-down (Yay! or Boo!). 
3. What type of outline should you use? 
   1. Informal outlines are most helpful for preliminary planning. They create order out of the chaos within your brain without getting too specific or restrictive. 
   2. Formal outlines are most helpful once your research is complete and you are approaching the rough draft stage. Depending on what type of paper you are writing, you might want to use one of several types of formal outlines. 
      1. Topic outlines are used for all types and lengths of papers. They list topics and details as single words or phrases and contain subdivisions which follow a parallel structure.  
      2. Sentence outlines use sentences rather than phrases, thereby making the outline more readable and including more detail. Sentence outlines can also be used for most any type of paper. 
      3. Paragraph outlines are most helpful when planning longer papers.