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This is Geoffrey Chaucer, and as far as we know, he never said anything about outlining. But we think he'd be on our side. (Source)
At this point in the paper process, you're probably so ready to write you're frothing at the mouth. You're like a soldier waiting for the attack, armed to the teeth with proper citation formatting, good research techniques, and a shining thesis statement. Well, this is the point where you're organizing for the final charge. You're directing your men into ranks and blocks, and putting on your helmet (helmet feather optional).
What's that look like in a non-military metaphor? It looks like creating a coherent, marvelous outline for the research paper you're about to write. Outlines are our favorite part of papers, because they make the actual writing process about a trillion times easier. Seriously. Picture yourself staring down at a totally blank piece of paper, and you have to fill it with seven pages of…something. Now picture yourself looking down at a beautifully detailed outline, with quotes, sources, and a solid structure. Which one sounds better to you?
In this lesson, we're going to walk through the kinds of things an outline should include and how they should look. Then you're going to make an outline of your very own. For, as the great Chaucer himself once said, "I doth outlin'd my books, prior to writing them, and that's why I became assign'd high school reading." Or something like that.
MAKING A PRETTY OUTLINE
MAKING A PRETTY OUTLINE
WHY YOU SHOULD LOVE OUTLINING AS MUCH AS I DO
I already gave you one scenario to explain why outlining is superior to not-outlining. Here are a few more things that outlining can do for you:
It can prevent your thoughts from devolving into senseless madness. You think you're smart and producing good writing, and then you go back to read it and it's like that one scene in The Shining.
It can organize your arguments and ideas so that the most important points and the supporting evidence for them become clear.
It can reveal gaps in your research. As you make an outline, it'll become clear what sections you need to do a little more research on.
It can help you structure your writing the way most academic writing is structured. That might sound boring, but most academic writing has a pretty basic layout: introduction, background information and literature review, main points of the argument, and then conclusion. When you outline your work, you get to participate in a legit style of writing.
THE STRUCTURE OF AN OUTLINE
So I've sold you the idea, but how do you actually write an outline? And what do they look like?
Outlines are hierarchical arrangements of all the major points and evidence for your research paper. By hierarchical, I mean that bigger ideas are positioned above the lesser, supporting points. The more detailed and specific the outline is, the better your paper writing will go.
Here's an example of a detailed but short outline on the topic of British environmental history:
Now, I want to emphasize that research papers might not be creative experimental fiction, but they're also not cookie-cutter products. The outline above has a lot of the necessary elements of a typical outline, but you still have creative and academic freedom to wiggle it all around if you think it'll work better for your particular topic (while still keeping a structure that lets you show main points and argue for them; let's not go crazy here).
INTEGRATING YOUR RESEARCH
Let's talk a little more about how to integrate all your backbreaking research labor into an outline. You want your sources organized into the places where they'll be most useful. That means you won't have to go digging through your sources for that one quote about the one thing you need or that source that was mentioned once somewhere.
Good outlining also helps keep your ideas from being accidentally swallowed up by somebody else's. A lot of beginning writers find a source they really like, with great arguments, and then they just start typing away on their papers. It's easy to end up just recycling that one dude's argument, without making your own. An outline clearly puts your idea at a higher level than anybody else's—all your sources have to support you, not take over your essay.
There are two techniques for integrating your research into your outline.
You can start by writing the outline, and then go through your sources and cram them into the right categories.
Or, you can start by looking at your research notes and categorizing your information under different headings. If you've got a paper on 1990s skateboarding culture, you might have quotes on the media coverage of it, the physical talent involved, and the way cities responded to increased skateboarding. Then you build the main points of your outline around those categories.
No matter which technique you use, make sure to keep quotation marks around specific quotes! You don't want to accidentally plagiarize. Not being a criminal is generally a good thing.
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