In our experience, developing outlines is where our clients have the most questions and experience difficulties. Outlines are most often used in the blue and green programs; however, they are also useful for red programs when client’s need to condense what they want to say for a prompt into short-answer essay questions. Stratosphere Writing (2020) mentions four benefits of outlining: focus, flow, balance, and completeness. Through our years of working with clients, we can attest how outlines do, in fact, offer these benefits. Outlines can help you focus on and clarify your thoughts. When clients have not used outlines, the paragraphs are long and tend to jump around between various thoughts and ideas rather than focusing on one primary idea. An outline allows the writer to briefly state the points they want to make in a paragraph. You can also use an outline to brainstorm and identify the most relevant points to your paper, allowing you to go from more general and broad topics to more specific and detailed arguments. A well-organized outline can help you create a good flow of thought and logic in your essay. There are two distinct ways that an outline helps with flow. First, it helps your flow while writing because it provides a basic structure for your paper and reminds you of key thoughts and ideas and what order they should be written. Second, keeping a good flow of thought during the writing process will transition to a good flow of thought when someone reads your essay. As mentioned previously, when clients have not used an outline, essay paragraphs include multiple points in one paragraph or move from one point to the next with no evidence or support. Developing an outline before you start writing can help you ensure you have a good balance between topics. Developing key arguments or points you want to address in the paper, writing down references and sources that support these points, and including brief analyses of the references in an outline help you ensure you have a similar amount of content for each point. For instance, past clients will have multiple references for two key points in an essay, but only one or two references for the third. This discrepancy in evidence limits the analysis one can provide for the evidence. Consequently, one idea will not have as much evidence or analysis as other points in the essay. This can weaken the overall argument of the essay. Your research into a topic should highlight some key points of consideration. Developing an outline can help you list those points and ensure you have not left out a major point identified by previous writers and researchers. In the past, clients have written an exceptional essay but left out a theoretical framework to support the paper's broader argument or forgotten to include a well-known key issue for their topic. Hence, developing a thorough and complete outline can help you avoid missing information, ensuring your essay is a complete argument. Maher (2020) highlights that a well-structured and detailed outline can help you identify weaknesses and gaps in your argument. For instance, each paragraph should include a topic sentence that identifies a key point, evidence to support your topic sentence, an analysis of this evidence in your own words, and a concluding sentence. In the past, clients have missed adding evidence to essays that support the main idea in a paragraph. However, a developed outline will help them remember to include evidence and provide an opportunity for the writer to include a detailed reference they are using as evidence. Consequently, this process helps writers to remember when and where to include appropriate references. This basic information for how to get started with organizing outlines should provide a solid foundation to incorporate into your own writing process. Outlines are a great way to organize your thoughts and help you gather evidence to support your essays. We have included several websites below where you can find additional guidance for assistance with outline development. Additional Sources for Assistance with Outlines Creating an Outline (Indiana University of Pennsylvania): https://www.iup.edu/writingcenter/writing-resources/organization-and-structure/creating-an-outline/ Five Steps to Create the Perfect Outline (Herzig University): https://www.herzing.edu/blog/herzing/5-steps-create-perfect-outline How to Outline (Purdue Writing Lab): https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/developing_an_outline/how_to_outline.html References Maher, M. 2020. “Importance of Doing an Outline Prior to Writing” Seattle PI. Accessed 22 February 2021 from https://education.seattlepi.com/importance-doing-outline-prior-writing-3570.html Stratosphere Writing. 2020. “4 Benefits of Outlines.” Accessed 22 February 2021 from https://stratospherewriting.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/4-benefits-of-outlines/
