The Power of Outlines

Don't be a ham-handed writer: good planning beats inconsistent inspiration.

Anyone who tries to create effective writing has probably started a fair amount of projects they haven't finished. If you're anything like me, you're already fourteen essays and three unfinished novels behind. I get it. Those dusty manuscripts of unsolved murder mysteries and shelved philosophy were supposed to be the Handel's Messiah of spontaneity, but they ended up about ten pages long and dull as a post. How in the world do writers escape this?

Well, the good news is that writing, like any other skill, is a combination of practice, problem-solving, and planning. If you were to hire a construction company to build your house (a little simplified but bear with me), wouldn't you be a bit nervous to see them dive into it head first without any planning? A house is a complicated thing—there are numerous systems within systems that all require a delicate and well-structured approach. As much as the majority of us wish to simply sit down and finally bust out that 300-page monster taunting us in our sleep, we need to approach writing like building a house. We need something to organize and prioritize the content we'll create. We need an outline.

Outlines are a bit underrated. I mean, nobody jumps head-over-heels for a shot to read writing about writing, but it's actually really important. Whether your'e pulling hair out over academic assignments that have ground to a halt, or finding yourself lost in the written mess of inconsistencies you have craftily woven yourself into, outlines help to preemptively catalogue, brainstorm, and organize your content. Itching to see what I mean? Don't lie. I know you're reading this because you don't normally use outlines in the first place. Thats okay, though! The first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem.

Let's examine three incredible benefits that outlines can offer to writers:

1. Outlines help catalogue and map writing

There's a great word that quickly sums up this idea: lore. Lore is a rich history or background of content that helps to give stories and essays their rich depth. This can take many forms across many genres of writing, but outlines ultimately help to foster this. For example, if you're writing an essay about—let's say—ham sandwiches, you are essentially crafting a trail for readers to follow. Of everything there is to say about ham sandwiches—their history, their many different recipes, their cultural impact, why they are so delicious—you must write to explore specific topics and information about them while tying everything together in some way. That's a HUGE task. Where do you even begin? Do you cross over from history into recipes? How much do you talk about each? How are they related to each other? It can get pretty overwhelming pretty fast, but outlines help us to think about our content as modules.

Instead of writing a paragraph about the history of ham sandwiches, and trying to blindly move on to another paragraph or topic, we can use outlines to write about how each topic/idea as a section operates. Want to talk about the history of the ham sandwich? Great! Plan out its structure: maybe choose three historical facts about it. Need to tie the section into another about recipes? Awesome! Now you can designate one of the history section's facts as a phrase or tidbit that segues into the next topic!

The great part about outlining your writing as sections is that it can expand as much as you'd like. Do you want more content about your history section's first fact? Create its own sub-section and dive in! You won't lose yourself in the writing because you have mapped out the document's main ideas, and you still get the freedom to develop and expand the lore within your writing as much as you'd like.

2. Outlines provide space to brainstorm new content

Another huge problem that writers commonly run into is not-so-fondly referred to as "writing block." We have all felt this. I assure you, if you have ever been assigned homework about any topic you didn't like, and had to write about it, and ended up slamming your head against a desk for hours, you have experienced this. It is not fun. Luckily, using an outline to take a step away from the writing that we don't know how to continue is an awesome way to think of new facets to explore!

Thinking about and designing our content in sections helps us to literally characterize it, and use any traits we find as prompts to continue our writing. Let's use our ham sandwich model as an example. Theoretically, our essay about ham sandwiches might discuss the following content:

Ham Sandwiches—Why are they so delicious?

Topic 1: History

Topic 2: Popular Recipes

Topic 3: What it means today

Our outline looks a bit empty so far, so let's expand it a bit!

Ham Sandwiches—Why are they so delicious?

Topic 1: History

Fact 1: Created in 1762

Fact 2: Created by the Earl of Sandwich

Fact 3: Absolutely delicious

Topic 2: Popular Recipes

Recipe 1: Ham and mustard

Recipe 2: The Italian Stallion

Topic 3: What it means today

Conclusion: Everyone should eat ham sandwiches

Now that we have explicitly written the sections of our Ham Sandwich Essay down, if we were to ever get stuck at any point, we simply have to step back and examine where we are in our outline: all of our content has already been planned out!

Say we can't think of anything else to write about our "Fact 2" sub-section. Let's consider some different characteristics about it:

1. History

2. Biography

3. Relatability

4. Applicability

Etc...

Depending on what we already have written, thinking about an outline like this can shed light on information we may either find interesting, find more information on (and ultimately more content to talk about), or both! This is all possible because we have planned the essay's content from the beginning, and are free to move however we want along our outline to tweak it.

3. Outlines breed focused, audience-centric arguments

Finally, though there are surely many more benefits to using outlines, planning our writing with one can help us to present our writing to audiences with the most effective structure possible! Sometimes the order, or priority of our writing can stray out-of-line from what we'd like it to be: we might not craft our paragraphs in a convincing order, or may extend the wrong topics far longer than we ought to. Often, we might even starve important components of our writing from well-deserved length and attention. Talk about yikes!

These pitfalls are exactly where outlines can, again, come in handy. If I don't like the order or balance of my text, but it's already written, I am plumb out of luck. I will be writing, editing, and probably crying late into the night. But if I plan out my arguments first, suddenly my text becomes a different and funner kind of puzzle! Let's apply this to our trusty ham sandwich model. Say that the main point of our essay is to convince ham sandwich haters that delicious variants exist for all kinds of palates, but our existing outline currently looks like this:

Ham Sandwiches—Why are they so delicious?

Topic 1: History

Fact 1: Created in 1762

i. Created in England

Fact 2: Created by the 4th Earl of Sandwich

i. Had a gambling problem

ii. Had good taste

iii. Requested food that could be eaten with his hands while gambling

Fact 3: Absolutely delicious

i. Absolutely true. Here's why.

Topic 2: Popular Recipes

Recipe 1: Ham and mustard

Recipe 2: The Italian Stallion

Topic 3: What it means today

Conclusion: Everyone should eat ham sandwiches

There is a problem of imbalance here. If we had not created an outline, we might have ended up writing an essay that focused too much on sandwich history, and ultimately needed much of its content chopped away. That would have probably taken the better part of a few hours to write—all completely wasted. Luckily, since we are using an outline first, we can see that if our primary goal in the essay is to focus on tasty sandwich recipes—and convincing ham haters to try them—we probably need more content focusing on delicious ham variants, like this:

Ham Sandwiches—Why are they so delicious?

Topic 1: History

Fact 1: Created in 1762

i. Created in England

Fact 2: Created by the 4th Earl of Sandwich

i. Requested food that could be eaten with his hands while gambling

Fact 3: Absolutely delicious

i. Absolutely true. Here's why.

Topic 2: Popular Recipes

Recipe 1: Ham and mustard

i. Easy to make; uses few condiments

ii. Provides a well-rounded sweet-to-savor ratio

iii. Both a tasty and nutritious snack

Recipe 2: The Italian Stallion

i. A classic sub stuffed full of bold, balanced flavors

ii. Demonstrates complex versatility of ham as a meat source

iii. Is as basic or customizable as anyone could want

Topic 3: What it means today

Conclusion: Everyone should eat ham sandwiches

i. My recipe analysis demonstrates ham sandwiches are for everyone

ii. I am backed by culminations of human history

iii. Block out the ham haters

Ah, now we are getting somewhere. Using an outline, we can refine exactly what it is we want to say, while altering what we say to best appeal to our target audience. Aristotle himself would shed a bittersweet tear. This is all possible because we have planned the structure from the beginning, and thought about the essay's contents in a slightly different way than we might be used to. Re-ordering the placement and balance of our document is certainly nothing for us to lift our nose at, and is all possible before we even begin to write because of our powerful outline!

Now, outlines aren't downright necessary for every piece of writing, every single time you write, but they can be an immensely helpful tool if you happen to engage in writing that either takes a long time to complete, or is immensely large. In fact, the larger your text ultimately will become, the more helpful an outline becomes! If you're willing to put in the extra effort to create an outline at the beginning of your writing, an outline can pay exponential yields into the overall quality and cohesive structure of your writing. And, that's it for now! Go try it for yourself, and meet all sorts of challenges that you can overcome!

Like what you've read? Be sure to check out my entire poetry collection at https://allpoetry.com/Chris_Dyrland-Marquis, or my newest love poetry book, Bitter Blossom Thunderclouds on the Apple iBook store! You can also see all of my available texts here on the site's "Available Books" section.

Yours,

Christopher Dyrland-Marquis