An outline is a tool to organize your thoughts about a topic or question. Like a graphic organizer, it helps you to visualize your ideas. But unlike graphic organizers which can quickly become crowded when details or longer thoughts or added, outlines provide a flexibility that easily accommodates multiple main ideas and details, including quotations and longer explanations.
An outline is in many ways like a first draft, but outlining helps us to think through the organization and flow of ideas before we go to the trouble of writing by removing the burden of writing in complete sentences, constructing effective paragraphs, using transitions and so on. An outline lets you focus on just the organization of your ideas.
For many writers, setting aside the time to outline before writing makes it more likely that your written essay has a structure that a reader will be able to easily follow. And of course, the better a reader can follow your ideas, the more likely it is that your writing will be successful at explaining whatever it is you're writing about.
How do you make an outline? Well, if you're familiar with outlines, you will have noticed that we just made one a moment ago. An outline uses the combination of labels and indentation to show how ideas are organized. First, Roman numerals are used to label the main ideas. Under each main idea, capital letters are indented one level and used to label the supporting ideas. The details or examples that back up each of these ideas are indented an additional line, labeled with a number and placed under the supporting idea. Lastly, any additional information about a detail or example is indented one more level, labeled with a lowercase letter and placed under the detail it refers to.
Though it what might look confusing if you're new to outlining, with a little practice making one is rather quick and simple. Just remember, you use both labels and indentation to show the relative importance of each idea and where it belongs in the structure of the paper. Ideas are labeled in Roman numerals, then capital letters, then numbers and then lowercase letters to indicate their level of importance. Less important details are indented more so that they fall underneath the ideas they support. Together, this creates an easily readable map that organizes all of your ideas and details before you start writing.
Now let's practice outlining by making an outline about something we already know like the Describe, Relate, Interpret Process we introduced in the Looking at Art video. First, let's title this outline Looking at Art. The easy part in this case is the main ideas because we already have them: Describe, Relate and Interpret. Let's start with Describe and work our way down the outline.
In the Describe step, we are supposed to first answer the question, what do you see? This is the first supporting idea. When answering this question, we're supposed to focus on all those elements of a work: color, line, shape, and so on. These are the details. Now, after answering the question, we're supposed to make a list. This is the second supporting idea, so we'll label it B and place it next.
Now for the Relate step, we're supposed to ask how do the parts interact? That will be our first supporting idea here. And we're supposed to focus on how the characters and forms are interacting, and how the characters and setting are interacting, so we'll add those as our details. Then we're supposed to answer the question, where is your attention focused? But since that's a new question and not part of the question, how do the parts interact, we'll make that a new supporting idea.
Since we don't have any details to put under it, we can move on to our next main idea, and this is the Interpret step. Here we're supposed to ask, what are the characters doing? We'll go ahead and make that our first supporting idea. And because we were supposed to tell a story as part of that question, we'll make, tell a story a detail. Then we're also supposed to ask the question, what does the artist want us to understand or feel. Since that's a new question, we'll make that a new supporting idea.
And that's it. That's our outline of the Describe, Relate, Interpret Process. We didn't have to write full sentences. We didn't have to worry about making paragraphs or using correct grammar. All we had to do was worry about structure, and now we have a map that lays out the process for us. And if we wanted to, it would be really easy to write it out in full sentences and paragraphs. And we'd probably be clear and more concise than if we had jumped straight into writing.