Post date: Jan 11, 2018 12:21:48 AM
A bootcamp participant emailed me with a question about outlines. I'm simply posting my reply. Outlines have been on my mind for a couple of years, especially as I've begun working with high school students whose teachers invariably require them. My memory of outlines from high school is one of "un-generative" constraints. There are several reasons for this that I won't go into here. But, suffice it to say, I've learned that thorough planning makes drafting easier and that outlines-- along with other tools for representing ideas and the architecture of a paper-- can be useful if used flexibly.
Hi--
I have a couple of suggestions. Apologies in advance-- I may entirely miss the mark. Outlines can be kind of idiosyncratic.
There are several kinds of outlines and you could do worse that looking over what you'd find at Harvard's website or OWL, but I'll give you the way I see this now in terms of three or four ideas. Once is a simple list, the second is a rough argument map, the third is a story board, and the fourth is a sentence outline.
Let's say you imagine the outline as something like a "zero" or ".5" draft and treat it similarly to drafting a piece of writing, so you embrace as something that's tentative and grows towards a kind of map to follow which you can elaborate upon up to the point that you decide to draft, then use it as something that you can return to as a kind of "click track" that keeps the beat for you. You might apply the "get the first draft written" principle to it as well, so you rough out a version of the outline straight through to the end, then take it through several iterations.
So the outline as a product and outline as a process are similar to drafting. The final product will provide you with a hierarchy of ideas. It might help not to see it as a map of the paper-- Roman Numeral I won't be "Introduction" for instance. The caveat here, of course, is that if you are working with a particular form, you might take that into account. If your piece absolutely begins with a review of the literature, you'll work with that, perhaps, before you get to the supporting claims.
Like a draft, the engine is still the organizing idea, the central claim of the piece. This might sound too "under grad-y" but remember, you're outlining the "reason why" your central claim is true. A should be seen in terms of B because A exposes C. If you're clear on that claim, or at least have a working, provisional version to start, your outline will account for the questions your reader will need answered to be able to understand your central claim and the evidence that supports the reasons why we should take it as true.
So if you have your central claim in front of you, you then list the reasons why the claim should be taken to be true, then the objections you anticipate. You keep in mind that among the many arguments you can make (x is better than y because; x makes z possible while y makes z unlikely) you can make "what exists" arguments-- people see it in this way, but it in fact looks like this.
I favor sentence outlines these days. I envision the roman numerals and other other levels as sentences that makes claims or statements, since I'll be building paragraphs and sections around them. So when I list I work toward that.
You might mess around with a simple argument map, which looks like a concept map. At the top level, you put your claim. It breaks out into a second level, which are the reasons why the claim is true. Under each "reason why" you add the evidence, illustrations or examples that support your claim. Under that, you make statements that explain how the evidence shows us that the reason why should be understood as true. You can draw separate branches for objections.
In any case, if you went straight to outlining, you'd think the same thing. The roman numeral would be the claim you're making. Underneath the claim, you'd organize statements that explain the evidence, illustration or example and the evidence you'll provide. You can include the objections that you need to address or outline according to classical argument structure, saving objection and rebuttal for later (if you're doing that sort of thing).
Another visual organizer that is essentially an outline is a storyboard. You sort of do the same thing. I divide up a page (or use separate pages). Each page or box has a claim at the top and within it, I try to answer the same questions: what evidence will is use to support the claim and what explains the way the evidence demonstrates that the claim is true.
The idea is to end up with an outline of your idea (or map or storyboard) that is built around claims that are reasons why that support your major claim, evidence that supports your reasons why, and statements that connect evidence to reasons. You don't make paragraphs, but where you can, you make statements so that you end up with the architecture of the piece. From this, you can move on to rhetorical choices in drafting, like "I'll write this paragraph dialectically, or this paragraph will work best if I review the development of an idea over time).
But again, getting through the whole outline in some fashion, then making passes to elaborate, with an eye toward clarifying your ideas as the basis for the architecture might be helpful.