Outlines Make Everything Better

Usually when I discuss an essay draft with a student, I ask if they’ve written an outline.

This isn't because it’s a routine question.

It almost always comes after some discussion about the status of the essay and the student's concerns.
Many of the problems I have encountered in writing – that of my students and students I have worked with as a tutor – stems back to issues of organization, which can be resolved or improved with an outline.

Outlines seem simple. They're lists of information and subjects to be discussed in an essay. A lot of people ignore this step though, because they already have a collection of paragraphs or they have an idea of what they are going to write and so don't worry about making a list.

But an outline makes everything clearer.

A piece of writing is a mass of words running left to right, and hundreds of them can fill a page without much to say where one point ends and another begins. Writing an outline is a way to take that mass of information and express it clearly, simply, and succinctly.

Seems easy enough. The first benefit is a list takes the task of writing an essay and turns it into a series of topics: one daunting task is now a list of manageable tasks. Second, because you have a series of specified points, it is unlikely you’ll be blurring topics in a single paragraph. Third,  because you have sorted the ideas, it is easier to understand why you’ve put topics where you have and what they have to do with the whole. Each paragraph should have something to do with the paragraphs before and after it, and having an outline makes it easier to recognize those points. From there, it makes it easier to find, remove, or repurpose tangential sections or paragraph. Fourth, once each paragraph is in a logical place, it becomes easier to transition from paragraph to paragraph.

Overall, an outline helps your essay become more refined, specific, focused, and easier to follow.

Outlines aren’t a panacea though. They still require attention and detail, and can themselves be a couple of pages if the essay is longer.

You also may start with a solid list, but things don't always go according to plan. Enter, one of my favorite tools, the reverse outline.

Reverse outlines are outlines you do after you've written an essay. Go back through your writing, and identify what's going on in each paragraph. Chances are they’re not what you planned or expected them  to be. This can be illuminating for the same reasons doing an outline is a good first step. It helps you figure out what you've addressed and where the essay has grown as you come up with new ideas. Maybe you discovered you need to address a certain topic in a different place or the topic of a paragraph changed from what you intended. Basically, you discover you need to reorganize a few things. So the next step is to make a new outline as a guide to what you need to do with the next draft..

How many outlines? I would say there should be at least one, maybe two for every draft.

Here's how to use this tool:

• Put together an outline before writing, if you haven't already.
  
• Then write a draft and make an outline based on what you wrote.
  
• Revise that outline to fix whatever issues you came across while making your outline.
  
• Use that revised outline to revise your essay, and then, put together another reverse outline.
  

Outlines give you a way to look at an entire piece on just one or two pieces of paper. Everything whittled down to the bare necessities. Whether it’s the start of a project, or just one in need of revision, taking a step back and transforming your essay into a list is clarifying.