Why Make an Outline?

My introduction to making outlines was in middle school. The public school was brand new (in the 1970s) and was outfitted with the latest in technology which meant those projectors that could put the teacher's notes done on plastic transparences up on the screen. Almost every class I took used them.

The way the teachers "taught" was at home to prepare for class; they made an outline of content and put it on the transparency sheets. They put that on the wall and covered all but the current item with a piece of paper. They sat and read that one sentence and told us to write it down in our notebooks. They waited. We wrote. The moved their paper down another line, read that aloud, we wrote. We waited patiently for the slow writers to finish. Repeat, repeat, repeat. At the end of that transparency they asked if everyone was done. They never were. I waited and doodled as I was a fast writer. This went on until the bell rang. Class over. Hooray for that nonsense being done for the day.

There was no discussion. This was not a real lecture. It was reading off of an outline. It was so boring. I hated it. It was more like what I now would call copywork. All it was, was copying off letter after letter with some spaces in between words and indents here and there to make it an outline not just a list. I didn't even know what we were writing about; it was just copying off letters. To make this more exciting I perfected my own penmanship style: nice fat cute looking letters. Sometimes I played a game by writing only a certain number of words on each notebook line before moving to the next line.

For me school was about counting down. Counting down the minutes until this class ended and the next and the next until the day was over then more counting down for each of the 180 days in the school year. Then that year was over, and then I could scratch one year off the big countdown until high school graduation when real life could begin, until the release from the jail ended and I could join the Real World.

But back to middle school...we were supposed to take the textbook and read that at home. We were to study these facts for the quizzes and tests. It was then that I'd read through the outline to see what I'd written in the mindless robotic class time. Class after class we did this copywork. That was school for me.

The other experience with outlines was when we'd have to write papers. In school in Language Arts class they taught me the "one right way" to write which included planning it all out by first making an outline. Then we would start the research and make the skimpy outline more detailed by kind of filling in the data. Then we would rearrange words to "make them our own" by making paragraphs of the outlined material. To add to this torture the teachers forced us to make outlines and rough drafts as part of our grade for the paper and dragged this out over many weeks’ time. I knew I worked better under pressure and that I could produce good papers under a time crunch.

This dragging out of the process was very hard for me. I basically would turn in garbage outlines and rough drafts then do the real paper the night before and get back a good grade. I hated the school game that wanted everything their one right way when if the goal was to do a good paper and I did that on the deadline was that not the real goal? Why did they want to try to control my whole creative process or refuse to let me use the work style that worked best for me?

As an adult who was seriously thinking about writing a book I began reading about published author's writing processes. I learned many used the writing process that I used to write long emails and blog posts. They did it like me! Who knew? I thought I was "winging it". And it involved no pre-planning and definitely no outlines! Some would call this the 'right brained' way of writing.

In a nutshell for this other way of writing, you start off by doing the actual writing but you only have a gist of where you want to go. As the words flow out I enter a state of "flow" and seem to go on auto-pilot where words and ideas come to me. The piece itself starts to go in a direction which I might never have planned. The writing flows until the ideas and thoughts stop. Once my brain is "done" with the creative part of the process, I then go back and re-read it to see the thing as a whole piece. I see gaps that need fleshing out or where I was redundant and make edits. I check the flow of the actual piece to be sure it is cohesive and moves from one idea to the next. That's how I write. Putting a day in between to read my writing with fresh eyes is often best for higher quality work but for my blog I don't always bother with that.

In 2004 I did NaNoWriMo and it was the first real time I tried writing a fiction novel. I completed the task by writing more than 50,000 words and actually making a full story with a plot that peaked and came to a conclusion. I wrote in the same manner I described. The process that many NaNoWriMo users used was the same method as mine.

My opinion of making outlines was pretty low; I felt it is nearly useless. Until now.

However, there is one purpose for outlining and I have decided it's worth knowing how to do it and when it would be a good idea. I have decided to teach my kids how to outline. I gave the first lesson off the top of my head to my thirteen year old two weeks ago. He produced a very good outline from a short chapter about spiders from a science book.

The conclusions I share here came from mulling this over in my mind. I honestly have not done any reading about what others have to say about outlining. (I wonder how my ideas mesh with theirs? I don't yet know.)

In my opinion outlining is a way to approach organizing facts or ideas from a piece of someone else's writing or research materials. I feel the outliner is almost attacking and dissecting the piece in order to arrange the facts by topic. In order to do this the way the reader reads must be a different method than when doing fiction reading for pleasure. The reader is now reading "for information".

In the process of going through a passage the reader will realize that facts on one topic can be scattered throughout the piece. Thus the outline does not always mirror the order of events in the written material. There is an act of organization of thoughts in the reader's mind which must take place in order to create their outline. This is a good mental exercise which I realized could be viewed as an exercise in reading comprehension.

In teaching my son how to make an outline I was reminded that it is nearly impossible to make a perfectly clean and neat outline the first time. It was not possible for him or me to memorize instantly all the data then to begin writing the outline, we had to start in writing it before we forgot the facts. We started off writing the outline in the order the author had approached the topic.

That first outline winds up being a rough draft because as the outline is started the learner may think the author was done telling about that topic so they move to the next category but later find that another fact was told near the end of the piece, so an edit is done by inserting some data. This leaves the outline a mess. (The student could choose to double space every line when writing with pencil on paper to leave room for insertions that may or may not be good enough. A computer's word processor would be fantastic for this exercise but there is something I struggle with when using my word processor's outlining function, it goes wonky.)

I taught my son to do that rough draft outline and to look it over then to re-write it neatly with the proper spacing to make a clean looking and readable outline that could be referred back to easily.

In doing this exercise we both realized that sometimes we felt the author was skimpy in their presentation of information. We knew some things from real life about spiders which were not mentioned when we felt they were essential to know. If the goal was just to take notes from one piece of writing that would be okay (even if the learner now has questions in their own mind about the missing information).

I explained to my son that if he were doing a research paper on spiders he could outline one author's writing, then realize the gaps and make a note to go find those answers in some other source. In reading the next piece of writing he may choose to make another outline of that then combine the two OR he could make one big outline with gaps in it and then do research to fill in the holes. The only challenge with that is to somehow note the sources so that the proper credit can be attributed so the student is not accused of plagiarizing.

In Conclusion

I started off with opinions about outlining being stupid based on the (dumb) way my middle school teachers tortured us with. Looking back I now feel they were spoon-feeding us information rather than lecturing us and teaching us to take our own original notes. It was almost as if they didn't trust us to be smart enough to know what was important enough to take note of so we'd have it in writing to refer back to and to study from. I think that they were trying to send us home with full data in order to study for the test so we could score well.

Since my middle school teachers hardly ever actually talked to us about the content I don't feel they were actually teaching us anything. Having been a trainer in a corporate classroom and also having given lecture presentations at conferences I can say I never, ever made an outline and read it off line by line to my audience (or doing that with an overhead projector), nor will I ever do that.

To prepare for my lectures or presentations, I have written out lots of words as if I was giving an oral lecture then nearly read that aloud though. I do that mostly as the writing of it developed the lecture's content, then I use that to keep me on track and to help me not forget to address a content area. I do try to not just read off the paper as I know that is sometimes annoying to experience as an attendee.

I now think that outlining is more of a writing exercise that requires reading "for information", thus outlining is not JUST something that is done by writing but it requires good reading comprehension skills. While doing an outline the student can actually be forced to learn to read for information and to read critically and that will improve their reading comprehension.

I think that outlining teaches the learner how to summarize and categorize data, which is one of the "critical thinking skills". It teaches the student to extract the important stuff or the core nugget facts from nonfiction written material. It also helps the student learn to drill down to a core skeleton (outline) of information. The outline can be bare bones or it could be fleshed out to become very detailed, depending on what the learner is trying to accomplish. If a very detailed outline is desired it would make sense to first make an outline that is vague but complete in it's sweep of information then to revise it to add details to every section.

Outlining is just one way to make notes. I am not convinced that outlining is the one right way to take notes that should be done for every lecture heard or every book read. I feel outlining has its place, especially helpful when gathering many facts to write a research paper with, to help organize large amounts of incoming data into categories and to assemble it in whatever way suits the learner's needs, such as if the paper was about one small area of a very large topic.

Having arrived at this conclusion that outlining done correctly and selectively can indeed be a useful tool for the student I feel it would be educationally neglectful for my homeschooled children not to know this skill, especially since they will attend college and maybe even high school. Outlining will now be a regular part of my kid's home education.