Effective Outlining

There are few things as daunting as sitting in front of a blank word processor, wondering how you are ever going to transform your research findings into a publishable paper. No matter your career stage, using an outline effectively can help you put proverbial pen to paper, ensure that your ideas are well-structured, and improve the clarity of your writing and organization.

What is an outline?

An outline is a general plan for what you are going to write that describes when you will discuss what specific points. Outlines are tools that can help writers of all levels improve the organization and clarity of their writing by allowing them to effectively structure their ideas before they write their manuscript. Outlines are skeletons, or scaffolds, of a paper that put the specific ideas and pieces of evidence you plan to discuss into a logical order.

How can outlines help me write?

Outlines can help you clearly structure your ideas before you start writing. When writing, it is tempting to simply write what comes to mind, letting one idea flow into another. While this can work in fiction, when used for academic writing, this method often results in confusing text that lacks cohesion or a clear sense of direction. Constructing a good outline, and sticking to it, ensures that your ideas are clearly presented and that your major results and contributions will be understood.

Outlines can also help you determine what the major points of your manuscript are; sometimes, the process of organizing your findings and analysis into a presentable format not only reveals what matters most to you, but also what exactly it is you are trying to say about your research. This is especially true in the humanities and social sciences, where the main argument of a paper is often more ambiguous than those in STEM disciplines. No matter your field, writing an outline can help you understand your own work better, and thus write a better manuscript.

Types of outlines

While you can format an outline however you want, there are two tried-and-true types of outlines widely used in academia: topic outlines and sentence outlines.

Topic outlines
These are the most common type of outlines and are helpful at any stage of writing; however, they are especially useful when you are just getting started, as they can help you overcome the paralysis that comes from staring at a blank page.

In topic outlines, roman numerals and alphanumeric characters are used to mark different levels of ideas (or topics) that you will incorporate into your writing, as well as to identify specific sections of your paper. The topics can be as vague or specific as you like, but generally take the form of bullet points that quickly state what information will be included where. These topics should be arranged in the same order they will appear in your paper, and should include more specific topics nested within more general ones. Topic outlines typically look something like this:


You can put any text you want into the outline, and it can be as detailed (or not) as you find helpful. What is most important in these types of outlines is that they include all of the most important sections you want to include in your paper, and that these ideas are arranged in a clear and logical order. At the most detailed level, an outline can include a topic representing each individual paragraph.

It can often be helpful to use the exact headings you plan to use in your paper as the outer layers in your outline, and then use specific details in the sub-headings. For example, one could structure a section of a topic outline like this


If you do something like this for all sections of your paper, then when you write, all you need to do is fill in the specific details in each section. If you make your outline detailed enough by including specific pieces of evidence and points in the inner layers of your outline, sometimes all you have to do is turn these into complete sentences organized under your headings.

Different types of papers will use different topics in different orders; for example, while a research article might be structured like the example above, a dissertation prospectus may have sections as follows:


A literature review or meta-analysis might look like this:


Sentence outlines

Sentence outlines are structured similarly to topic outlines, but are more detailed. What differentiates them is that sentence outlines use complete sentences to explain the exact purpose of each section, and usually include the topic (and sometimes also the concluding) sentences of each paragraph. A (very simplified) section of a sentence outline might look something like this:


A detailed sentence outline accomplishes everything a topic outline does, and more. By forcing you to write in complete sentences rather than in bullet points, creating sentence outlines can be very helpful for getting you to think about how you are going to actually begin writing.

It is also helpful to write a sentence outline using the exact sentences you plan to actually include in your paper. If you do this and your sentence outline is detailed enough, then to turn it into a paper all you have to do is reformat the outline and maybe add some very specific details, as most of the sentences you plan to use in the paper will already be written and arranged in the proper order in your outline.

Sentence outlines can also be used as a more detailed version of a topic outline. Once you have made a topic outline, you can turn it into a sentence outline by rewriting your topics as full sentences. In this way, you can ease yourself into the transition from research to writing; the topic outline helps you organize your thoughts, and the sentence outline helps you determine how you will turn your ideas into presentable writing.

Five tips for using outlines effectively

While outlines are incredibly helpful, you also need to be thoughtful in how you use them. Below are five tips to keep in mind when writing and using an outline to ensure that you get as much out of the experience as possible.

1. Be as detailed as you can. It can sometimes be tempting, especially in a topic outline, to write down only your major ideas, order them sequentially, and then begin writing. While this works for some writers, it is almost always better to be as detailed as you can, down the level of deciding when you will discuss each piece of evidence. The more detail you include in your outline, the easier your life will be when you start writing your manuscript.

2. Be flexible. A good outline will help you structure your ideas and writing, but you should be open to changing your outline as you work. This is especially true when still drafting your outline; do not hesitate to move topics around and rearrange your outline to ensure that your ideas all fit together. You will still want to stick to your outline as much as possible when writing your manuscript, but sometimes your thoughts about how your ideas and topics work together will change as you work. If this happens, it is simple to rearrange your outline: simply copy and paste your topics into a new place in the outline and relabel them. Your outline should be a guide and a living document, not a set of unbreakable rules, especially when you are still finishing the outline itself.

3. Focus on ideas, not flow. While ensuring that the text of a manuscript reads smoothly is important, this is not the focus of an outline, which should focus on how ideas are most easily understood and not on how the writing flows. The structure of an outline should be based entirely on how, and in what order, ideas most logically fit together. One advantage of outlines is that they make it easy to see your overarching argument and how the pieces fit together. Do not worry about transitions when outlining; internal consistency and logic are the most important things to consider when making an outline, as this will provide the solid skeleton that keeps your paper coherent and cohesive. You can worry about flow and transitions when writing the first draft or editing it before submission.

4. Be consistent. While it is important to be open to changing your outline where appropriate, especially while still writing it, it is also important to stick to your outline as much as you can once it is completed and you start writing. If you do not use your outline to guide how you write your paper, then you are not getting the most out of your outline, and risk your argument becoming unclear as you write. Your outline’s focus on how ideas fit together is important; generally, the structure you develop in your outline will be clearer and easier to understand than the structure you will want to use when you are writing the manuscript. Your writing may seem choppy and somewhat disjointed at first, but you can fix these issues later through the use of transitional sentences and words while still preserving the organizational logic of your outline.

5. Use your outline topics as headings. One of the best ways to get the most value from your outline is to, from the beginning, think of the outer topics as headings and subheadings. Your outermost topics should be your overarching sections: the Introduction, Literature Review, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion. The next layer of topics should be your subheadings, and then after that it may make sense to either have another subheading layer or to then transition into using topics that represent a paragraph or two. By organizing your outline according to your subheadings, you ensure that the transition from outline to manuscript is easy and smooth, and you will be able to create a logical subheading order before you write. Subheadings can be complex and difficult to order effectively, but if you have a good outline, you might already have your first draft of your subheadings!

Though it may be tempting to simply dive into writing your manuscript, taking some time to draft an outline first will not only make your writing clearer, but will make the writing process easier as well.