Directions for Outlining
When a writing task, such as a thesis paper, essay, or book, seems daunting, creating an outline can provide direction and help lessen the writer's feeling of being overwhelmed. An outline is like a guideline for a piece of writing, lining up the different steps covered in a piece of writing in a thoughtful, logical order. When having difficulty imagining the scope of a writing task, consider creating an outline to get a comprehensive view of what the piece of writing intends to convey to its audience.
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Instructions
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Research the subject thoroughly for the project that you are outlining. For example, for an essay about vampires, research vampire books, vampire films, scholarly articles, personal accounts of experiences with vampires, and vampire history. This way the outline will be a natural extension of the material available, and you can avoid searching for information that does not exist, or struggling to come up with information for headings and subheadings. Research fills the gaps in knowledge and can provide additional ideas for your writing project.
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Write a thesis statement. The thesis statement is a short, concise sentence that describes the main idea of the outline and writing assignment and expresses the particular stance you are taking on the subject. In the essay about vampires, the thesis statement could be "Vampires are children of the devil and can be killed in a variety of ways, including a stake through the heart, beheading, and garlic."
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Decide how to arrange the order of the outline. An outline can be arranged chronologically, with the ideas presented in the same order as they will appear in the final written product. Another approach is grouping the ideas spatially, with similar ideas grouped together that might not necessarily be in the order they appear in the final written product. For the vampire essay, the outline could follow the chronological order of the thesis statement, explaining why vampires are creatures of the devil before going into methods of killing, while a spatial outline would group ideas as they come to the reader's mind without necessarily following the order of the final written product. For example, maybe the writer writes the outline parts about killing vampires first, though wants to put this at the end of the outline, and later details why vampires are evil, though later decides to put this at the beginning of the essay.
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Create headings.The heading describes a general idea that the subheadings describe in more specific detail. A heading can be a sentence, a theme, or a specific question. The headings should display parallelism: if the first heading starts with a verb, the rest of the headings should start with verbs. For example, if the first heading is called "Killing Vampires," then the second heading could be "Banishing Vampires," but not "How do you banish vampires?," as the first heading was not a question. Number headings in Roman numerals, such as I, II, III. Each outline should have at least two headings.
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Create subheadings. The subheadings should discuss specific ideas related to the heading, and two subheadings are required for each heading. For example, underneath "Killing Vampires" could be the subheadings, "Stakes," "Beheading," and "Garlic." Subheadings are titled in capital letters, such as A, B, C, etc. If the subheadings need another level of subheadings to further detail the subject, use Arabic numerals such as 1, 2, 3, etc. For example, underneath "A. Stakes" you may need to have secondary subheadings for "1. Metal Stakes" and "2. Wooden Stakes."
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Go back and revise the outline if needed. The outline should be a flexible guide for creating a final written product, and not a set of rigid rules. If additional information is found, or the written product takes a new direction because of the natural flow of writing, go back to revise the outline to accurately reflect these changes.
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References
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