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Why You Need an Outline

When teaching composition or rhetoric courses, I always require an outline as one step in the prewriting process.


Outlines organize your thoughts logically. For structured or formula-driven writing, outlines are pencils down your best bet for achieving a clear roadmap and balanced sections.


Here's a confession, though (please don't tell my students): my writer mind doesn't work that way.


I may be a Planner with a capital P in real life, but in my creative life, not so much.


So, as prescriptive tools, outlines fail me when I'm writing new material. To borrow from E. M. Forster, How can I tell what I think till I see what I write?


But as revision tools during the developmental editing process? Outlines deliver the goods.

They reveal, in bulleted lists with perfectly aligned margins (thank you, Mrs. McBride, my sixth grade English teacher), what I have written. The lack of (or over-) emphasis, the holes (or near-obsession), the obvious flaws any close reader would notice but the writer is too close to catch.

Image: an outline


For example.


In my current book project, I'm covering just five months of "real time" chronology within an extended period of three decades (plus some events or people on either side of the bookend). The narrative is neither linear nor straightforward, and to make it even more complex, the form is multi-genre.


Does that description exhaust you? Gosh, me too! 😫


I dust off my outline skills not to plan but to revise.


If a tool doesn't work for you, jettison it without apology.


If a tool works for you in a different way than is intended, guess what? It doesn't matter! No one is standing over you with a ruler! (To measure margins, of course, though no beatings happen either.)


Creative play ain't just for kids' toys.




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