2.1 Should You Outline?
Outline first, write last.
What is the best way to improve writing? Many books about writing answer by promoting outlining (Atchity, 1995; Butler & Burroway, 2005; Carpenter, 2020; Dillard, 1989; Hawker, 2015; Heard, 2022; Kumar, 2020; Rosnow & Rosnow, 1998; Sarnecka, 2019; Sawers, 2002; Schimel, 2012; Silvia, 2007; Swain, 1974; Wheelan, 2022). “On my list of maladaptive practices that make writing harder, Not Outlining is pretty high. … Writers who complain about ‘writer’s block’ are writers who don’t outline” (Silvia, 2007, p. 79).
However, other books disagree with such advice and recommend avoiding outlining altogether (Greene, 2013; Kidder & Todd, 2013; King, 2000; Lamott, 1995). Some books present outlining’s benefits and costs and do not promote outlining as a method (Pinker, 2014; Sword, 2017). Some books fail to even mention outlining, (Brande, 1934; Flaherty, 2009; Kail, 2019; Strunk & White, 1959; Sword, 2012, 2016; Zinsser, 1988, 2006).
Why do books about writing not agree about outlining’s benefits? First, many successful writers do not outline. Stephen King offers advice for avoiding what he calls the tyranny of the outline (King, 2000). E. L. Doctorow said “The most important lesson I’ve learned is that planning to write is not writing. Outlining a book is not writing. Researching is not writing. Talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing” (Weber, 1985).
Second, few agree about what ‘outlining’ means. To some, a discipline’s writing conventions provide an outline (Sarnecka, 2019). To others, an outline merely consists of a few phrases scribbled on paper (Clark, 2008b). Others use a catalog of written notes, with links from one note to another — a zettelkasten – to create a manuscript’s structure (Ahrens, 2022; Kadavy, 2021; Luhmann, 1992). Heard (2022) describes many different methods for outlining, including two sentence mini summaries, word stacks, concept maps, figure shuffling, and listing paragraph topic sentences. From her interviews with academic writers, Sword (2017) reports widely varying outlining practices, ranging from historian Kevin Kenny, who produced a fifty-page outline he then converted into a book in a single summer, to historian Russell Gray, who first plans a manuscript out in his head (only occasionally jotting the plan down) before sitting down and writing the full manuscript.
In short, writers who outline use widely varying methods, and many writers avoid outlining altogether. Despite such diversity, when I ask myself ‘Should I outline?’, I answer with a resounding ‘Yes!’. In the current chapter I explain my answer by introducing an outlining scaffold.
My method uses cognitive scaffolding to create an outline. My method moves ideas from my mind into my world where I can evaluate and organize them. My outline develops by external thinking: I read and manipulate index cards which hold my ideas. My method produces a paragraph-by-paragraph structure to insert into a word processing document. The structure provides an ordered set of paragraph topics; you draft two key sentences for each paragraph; you also can place other components (section headings, figures, tables, citations). When I move my outline into a word processor, I find I have already completed the hard work required to create my first draft.
