Create an outline to invent and organize.

Like listing and clustering, outlining is both a means of inventing what you want to say and a way of organizing your ideas and information. As you outline, you nearly always see new possibilities in your subject, discovering new ways of dividing or grouping information and seeing where you need additional information to develop your ideas. Because outlining lets you see strengths and weaknesses at a glance, it can also help you read and revise with a critical eye.

There are two main forms of outlining: informal outlining and formal topic or sentence outlining. Among the several types of informal outlining, scratch outlines are perhaps the most adaptable to a variety of situations.

A scratch outline is little more than a list of the essay’s main points. You have no doubt made scratch outlines many times—to plan essay exams, to revise your own writing, and to analyze a difficult reading passage. Here are sample scratch outlines for two different kinds of essays. The first is an outline of Annie Dillard’s essay in Chapter 2, and the second shows one way to organize a position paper (Chapter 6):

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Scratch Outline: Essay about a Remembered Event

  1. explains what she learned from playing football

  2. identifies other sports she learned from boys in the neighborhood

  3. sets the scene by describing the time and place of the event

  4. describes the boys who were playing with her

  5. describes what typically happened: a car would come down the street, they would throw snowballs, and then they would wait for another car

  6. describes the iceball-making project she had begun while waiting

  7. describes the Buick’s approach and how they followed the routine

Scratch Outline: Essay Arguing a Position

Presentation of the issue

Concession of some aspect of an opposing position

Thesis statement

First reason with support

Second reason with support

(etc.)

Conclusion

Remember that the items in a scratch outline do not necessarily coincide with paragraphs. Sometimes two or more items may be developed in the same paragraph or one item may be covered in two or more paragraphs.

Chunking, a type of scratch outline commonly used by professional writers in business and industry and especially well suited to collaborative and multimodal composing, consists of a set of headings describing the major points to be covered in the final document. What makes chunking distinctive is that the blocks of text—or “chunks”—under each heading are intended to be roughly the same length and scope. These headings can be discussed and passed around among several writers and editors before writing begins, and different chunks may be written by different authors, simply by typing notes into the space under each heading. The list of headings is subject to change during the writing, and new headings may be added or old ones subdivided or discarded as part of the drafting and revising processes.

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For more on parallelism, see Chapter 10 and section E7 of the Handbook.

The advantage of chunking in your own writing is that it breaks the large task of drafting into smaller tasks in a simple, evenly balanced way; once the headings are determined, the writing becomes a matter of filling in the specifics that go in each chunk. Organization tends to improve as you get a sense of the weight of different parts of the document while filling in the blanks. Places where the writing project needs more information or where there is a problem with pacing tend to stand out because of the chunking structure, and the headings can be either taken out of the finished project or left in as devices to help guide readers. If they are left in, they should be edited into parallel grammatical form like the items in a formal topic or sentence outline, as discussed below.

Topic outlines and sentence outlines are considered more formal than scratch outlines because they follow a conventional format of numbered and lettered headings and subheadings:

Period follows numbers and letters

First word of each item is capitalized

  1. Main topic

    1. Subtopic of I

    2.  

      1. Subtopic of I.B

      2.  

        1. Subtopic of I.B.2

        2.  

          1. Subtopic of I.B.2.b

          2.  

    3.  

      1. Subtopic of I.C

      2.  

The difference between a topic and sentence outline is obvious: Topic outlines simply name the topics and subtopics, whereas sentence outlines use complete or abbreviated sentences. To illustrate, here are two partial formal outlines of an essay arguing a position, Jessica Statsky’s “Children Need to Play, Not Compete,” from Chapter 6.

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Formal Topic Outline

  1. Organized sports harmful to children

    1. Harmful physically

      1. Curve ball (Koppett)

      2. Tackle football (Tutko)

    2. Harmful psychologically

      1. Fear of being hurt

        1. Little League Online

        2. Mother

        3. Reporter

      2. Competition

        1. Rablovsky

        2. Studies

Formal Sentence Outline

  1. Highly organized competitive sports such as Peewee Football and Little League Baseball can be physically and psychologically harmful to children, as well as counterproductive for developing future players.

    1. Physically harmful because sports entice children into physical actions that are bad for growing bodies.

      1. Koppett claims throwing a curve ball may put abnormal strain on developing arm and shoulder muscles.

      2. Tutko argues that tackle football is too traumatic for young kids.

    2. Psychologically harmful to children for a number of reasons.

      1. Fear of being hurt detracts from their enjoyment of the sport.

        1. Little League Online ranks fear of injury seventh among top reasons children quit.

        2. One mother says, “Kids get so scared. . . . They’ll sit on the bench and pretend their leg hurts.”

        3. A reporter tells about a child who made himself vomit to get out of playing Peewee Football.

      2. Too much competition poses psychological dangers for children.

        1. Rablovsky reports: “The spirit of play suddenly disappears, and sport becomes joblike.”

        2. Studies show that children prefer playing on a losing team to “warming the bench on a winning team.”

Every level of a formal outline except the top level (identified by the roman numeral I) must include at least two items. Items at the same level of indentation in a topic outline should be grammatically parallel—all beginning with the same part of speech. For example, I.A and I.B are parallel when they both begin with an adverb (Physically harmful and Psychologically harmful) or with an adjective (Harmful physically and Harmful psychologically); they would not be parallel if one began with an adverb (Physically harmful) and the other with an adjective (Harmful psychologically).