2.4 A Desirable Outline

You need a detailed outline to scaffold your first draft.

When I created Table 2-1, I performed the opposite of outlining, because I started with complete sentences and ended with paragraph topics. I presume Fodor and Pylyshyn did the reverse and began with topics which they later converted into paragraphs. Their final outline may have had a structure like the one presented in Figure 2-5.

Figure 2-5’s most important property is the one-to-one correspondence between topics and paragraphs. Sarnecka (2019, p. 235) notes “organizing your writing into topic-sentence paragraphs allows you to switch back and forth between outlines and drafts, which is magic when you are developing a complicated argument.”

Note the Figure 2-5 paragraphs are incomplete. Each cone in the figure represents a particular paragraph which will communicate a particular topic. When you begin to create an outline, your outline need only contain potential topics.

Figure 2-5 illustrates another important property: topic order. In creating your outline, you decide to present topics in a particular order to communicate your manuscript’s main message. For instance, you could organize your topics along the lines illustrated in Figure 2-4, moving from general topics to more specific topics.

Figure 2-5’s dual nature implies paragraph order on the right mirrors the topic order on the right. You reinforce paragraph ordering with links between paragraphs, illustrated by the arrows connecting paragraphs in Figure 2-5. Recall, from Figure 2-3, you link paragraphs by connecting each concluding sentence to two different topic sentences. Hence your most desirable outline would present topics in order, each communicated by a different paragraph; your outline would also provide each paragraph’s first and last sentence.

Imagine taking such an outline and typing each paragraph’s topic and concluding sentences into a word processing document. Your typed entries provide your manuscript’s skeleton: you have topics in a desired order, you have mapped each topic onto a single paragraph, and you have generated topic and concluding sentences for each paragraph. You provide your manuscript’s narrative with the meaningful links you have made between concluding sentences and topic sentences. To convert your document into a workable first draft, you only need to put flesh on your skeleton.

Adding flesh to the skeleton requires adding supporting sentences between each paragraph’s topic and concluding sentences. But your manuscript’s skeleton scaffolds what supporting sentences you add. Supporting sentences elaborate a paragraph’s topic. Fortunately, you already have each paragraph’s two most important sentences in your document, sentences which place strong constraints on what supporting sentences you can add.

You want to create a detailed outline for a manuscript, an outline with a structure like the one in Figure 2-5. However, such an outline takes effort to create. You rarely can generate the correct paragraph topics, in a desirable order, when you start a manuscript. Instead, you must work hard to produce the desired outline. Let me now show how you can use cognitive scaffolding to develop an outline whose structure is illustrated in Figure 2-5.