What Is an Outline?

It is a writing is a tool that organizes your main ideas, supporting points, and overall structure before you begin drafting. Think of it as a roadmap or skeleton for your essay, paper, story, or any other piece of writing. The outline typically arranges information in a hierarchical manner—using headings, subheadings, and bullet points or letters and numbers—showing how the smaller ideas relate to larger ones.

Why Create an Outline?

Creating an outline offers several important benefits for writers:

• Organization: It helps you arrange your thoughts and information logically, ensuring nothing important is left out and all points are connected.

• Clarity and Focus: By planning ahead, you can see the “big picture,” avoid going off-topic, and maintain a clear path throughout your writing.

• Efficiency: Outlines make the drafting process smoother and less stressful, as you already know what each section will include, saving time and effort.

• Coherence: You can ensure a logical flow between sections and ideas, making your writing easier to follow.

• Revision Tool: An outline allows you to check the structure, rearrange sections easily, and spot gaps or weak points before drafting.

• Confidence: Starting with an outline provides direction and makes beginning the draft less overwhelming.

Writers at all levels—students, professionals, and creatives—use outlines to streamline their writing, structure their arguments, and produce clearer, more effective work. Even if not required by your instructor, using an outline can greatly improve the quality and ease of your writing process.

Creating your Outline:

Before beginning an outline, it is useful to have a clear thesis statement or clear purpose or argument, as everything else in the outline is going to work to support the thesis. Note: the outline might help inform the thesis, and therefore, your thesis might change or develop within the outlining process.

Organize your outline in whatever format fits into the structure needed for the type of paper you are writing. One common outline format uses Roman numerals, letters, and numbers. Other outlines can use bullet points or other symbols. You can use whatever organizational patterns work best for you and your paper, as long as you understand your own organizational tools. Outlines can be written using complete sentences or fragments or a mix of the two.

Remember! After creating your outline, you may decide to reorganize your ideas by putting them in a different order. Furthermore, as you are writing, you might make some discoveries and can, of course, always adjust or deviate from the outline as needed.

What does it look like?

• A visual plan: An outline presents the key points you intend to cover, arranged in a logical order.

• Flexible structure: It can be as simple as a list of topics and supporting facts, or as detailed as a breakdown of every paragraph and point.

• Common formats: Outlines often use Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numbers, and lower-case letters to indicate levels of importance and organization.

Sample Outlines:

As you can see in the outline below, the writer chose to separate the outline by topics, but could have utilized a different structure, organizing the outline by separate paragraphs, indicating what each paragraph will do or say.

Example 1:

1. Introduction
   A. Background information
   B. Thesis
2. Reason 1
   A. Use quotes from x
   B. Use evidence from y
3. Reason 2
   A. Use quotes from x
   B. Use evidence from y
4. Reason 3
   A. Counterargument
   1. They might say…
   2. But…
5. Conclusion
   A. Connect back to thesis
   B. Answer the “so what” or “what now” question
   C. End on a memorable note

Note: The sample outline above illustrates the structure of an outline, but it is quite vague. Your outline should be as specific as possible.