For many people, making an outline is an important part of the writing process.
Outlines can help you to see the big picture of your paper and to decide how to arrange
your ideas.
Let's imagine you are working on a paper that asks you to advertise an advertising campaign.
You've chosen to focus on an ad for your favorite snack food.
You've research your topic and brainstormed plenty of ideas, but you aren't sure how to
organize them.
So you decide to try making an outline as a way of exploring your options.
When you are just getting started, here are some questions you might ask yourself.
Do some of the ideas naturally cluster together?
How many clusters are there?
Which ideas are more important or general?
Which ones are more like supporting details?
What order should the ideas be in?
What order would be best?
Once you have answered these questions, you are ready to draft an outline.
Try putting the biggest ideas at the top level and the details below them.
As you look at your outline now, are there parts that don't seem to fit?
Are you repeating yourself?
If so, is that helpful?
Or is it not?
Do you have enough details to support each of your main ideas?
Is anything missing?
Are you happy with the order you've chosen?
Or do you want to rearrange some things?
Outlines don't have to look just like this.
There are many ways to represent relationships between ideas.
Your outline can take the form of a map, or a timeline, or a flowchart.
You can write your ideas on notecards or post-it notes and try out different arrangements.
Or, you can make a powerpoint presentation of your ideas.
As you arrange your slides, you will be organizing your paper.
Try some of the different kinds of outlines and see what works best for you and your current
writing project.