Outlines are enormously helpful in putting together a speech, providing a framework for your speech materials and a blueprint for your presentation. In an outline you separate the main and supporting points—the major speech claims and the evidence to support them—into larger and smaller divisions and subdivisions. By plotting ideas into hierarchical fashion based on their relative importance to one another, and by using indentation to visually represent this hierarchy, you can’t help but examine the underlying logic of the speech and the relationship of ideas to one another.¹

Outlines rely on coordination and subordination. Coordination refers to assigning points of equal significance or weight the same level of numbering (e.g., I, II, III, A, B, C, 1, 2, 3, and so on). Subordination is the arrangement of points in order of their significance to one another, descending from general to specific or abstract to concrete. (For a review of the principles of coordination and subordination and the mechanics of outlining, see Chapter 11.)