Using outlines, wireframes, and storyboards

How you organize the information you’re presenting depends on your purpose. If you are teaching your readers to do something new, you will probably need to provide straightforward, step-by-step, numbered instructions. If you are composing a video essay that inspires people to reflect or to take action, you may have more flexibility in arranging your information for impact.

Once you have a strong sense of your topic and main idea and you’ve begun to assemble support, you’ll want to think about organizing your ideas. Often for traditional essays, instructors focus on creating outlines, where you begin with a thesis statement and then develop the key ideas you will express in the body of your paper. Creating an outline is also an effective way to get started on a multimodal piece, because regardless of what you choose to include and how you choose to share information, it’s crucial to have some guiding organization—a skeleton that you can flesh out in a draft.

After Alyson D’Amato had considered her purpose and audience, determined her genre (an informative website), and started planning her content (brewing tea), she considered the different ways she could present information on a website. Having one long page readers would scroll down to read didn’t seem ideal—nor did it seem to her like a good way to effectively create a web page.

D’Amato decided to create a wireframe, or mock-up, of her project before starting to build her website. At first, D’Amato was going to have only three main links: to her tea story, to brewing tea, and to tea types. “Making blends” was going to be a link within the brewing tea page, and black, green, and white tea information was going to be linked from the tea types page.

She decided, however, that she didn’t want to bury all of that information and make users click to a page and then link deeper to get to information she thought was important, so she decided on six main links.

D’Amato’s revised wireframe for a website

This wireframe for a website shows the home page and the six pages that will be linked from the home page.

Other tools can be useful for organizing your ideas. For instance, moviemakers often use a storyboard to think about how they will express ideas in a video. A storyboard provides a space for a composer to describe the scene being set, any text that will appear on the screen, and the music or other sounds that will be in the scene. There’s also room for the composer to add specific notes and a place for describing a transition.

Storyboard for a multimodal project

Related topics:

Deciding what type of project you want to create

Drafting to support your main idea