Lecture 07 | What is an Outline?

1. What is an outline

Many people think of outline as a rough idea of your draft. However, I strongly disagree with them. It is not a rough idea. Outline is a planned, organised and focused structure of your writing.  Almost all the authors find it easier to prepare and follow the outline before they start on a blank page. Outline organises your thoughts, ideas and divides them into sub-ideas. It is one of the most important tools to organise your ideas in logical order which, combined all together, support your thesis statement. Summarily, outline makes your story line clearer and elaborate.   

2. Why to make an outline

Many students often ask when our ideas are clear in our mind why to make an outline. Well, this is an assumption. When you sit to write, you will come to realise that ideas are not as clear as you had thought them to be. many things become confused with each other and, finally, you end up with wastage of time and energy. In order to avoid this sort of frustration at the end, better one should spare some time in preparing a planned outlined. 

Outline helps in determining what arguments and sub-arguments to cover and in which order. It makes your writing piece easier for readers to read and follow. It enables you to guide your readers throughout your piece. It avoids confusions in your thoughts and ideas.  For instance, many of the writing pieces I receive from my students in the course of "Creative Writing" fail to guide the reader. Repetition of argument, illogical order of ideas are the common issues with such writing pieces. That's why I usually and mainly focus on students' outlines. 

3. When to prepare an outline

Outline is normally prepared during prewriting. It means you have to make it before you start writing. For, as it is already stated, that an outline puts all the ideas and sub-ideas in their proper place with a logical order. Therefore, a well planned outlined helps a great deal in determining the story line the author is going to follow while writing.

It's not over yet. We still need to discuss about outline. Stay connected.