“What’s Your Point?” Understanding Outlines
In college, I took a lot of creating writing courses. Writing is what I was good at, and creative writing was a fun outlet that sparked so much joy.
When it came to classwork, I found myself frustrated by some of my professors.
Photo by Latoya Dixon Smith
“Tiff, you need to outline. You were supposed to turn that in already.”
But try as I might, my outlines always sucked and brought on so much frustration. When it came to actually writing, my short stories were always graded so high that I thought I could get through life without outlining.
Ha. That’s a funny thought!
When I got into content marketing, I quickly realized I wouldn’t last a day without research and outlines. But I hate them with such a passion, how did I get past it?
Well, friends, here I am. Giving you advice on something that took me forever to understand. Let’s talk outlines.
According to The Writing Center, outlines help you connect trains of thought:
Photo by Latoya Dixon Smith
“Outlining is a tool we use in the writing process to help organize our ideas, visualize our paper’s potential structure, and to further flesh out and develop points. It allows the writer to understand how he or she will connect information to support the thesis statement and the claims of the paper. An outline provides the writer with a space to consider ideas easily without needing to write complete paragraphs or sentences.”
Organizing ideas is the main take away from this quote. A great analogy is running a marathon. Do you personally know anyone who ran a marathon successfully who didn’t practice leading up to the race? I can’t name a single soul.
The same goes for writing without an outline. If you don’t know where you’re heading with what you’re working on (ie. if your muscles don’t know how far you expect them to go) your writing will fall flat.
By outlining the topics you want to discuss, you’ll save yourself time in the long run. Outlines are important for multiple reasons, but here’s why I use them:
· Helps me stay focused and on target for my topic (I avoid bunny trails!)
· I’m much less likely to stumble upon the dreaded writer’s block
· I can organize numerous ideas about a singular topic
Photo by Latoya Dixon Smith
· Helps me focus on point by point instead of being overwhelmed with all the pieces floating around in my head
There are multiple methods to outlining (topic outlines and sentence outlines are both popular). I prefer topic outlines as they’re more concise and I can jot them down in about ten to fifteen minutes. Take your time while making outlines and save yourself hours of work later down the road.
I hope this was helpful! Have more questions about how to outline and organize your thoughts? Drop me a line, I’d be happy to talk about it.
