While prewriting helps you discover your topic and what you want to say, organizing and outlining helps you find the best framework for arranging your thoughts about your main idea. To do this, you will need to go through a process to decide what information to include and how to organize that information. After you’ve organized your thoughts, creating an outline will help you determine the order in which you should present ideas and create a plan for whatever you are writing.
Outlines come in different forms, but regardless of their form, they all provide the writer with a guide to follow as he or she writes.
Benefits of Organizing and Outlining
When you are generating ideas, those ideas rarely occur to you in an organized manner. Nor should they. When you prewrite, you free your creative mind to let ideas flow without worrying about their order. However, before you write, you must organize your thoughts. When you read something, you expect the author to have grouped his or her ideas together, divided them into paragraphs, and linked thoughts together so that you can follow them. Likewise, the readers of your writing will expect the same of you. If you offer your readers a collection of disorderly, random thoughts, they are likely to become confused about what you are trying to say. They are also likely to miss important connections you want them to make.
Determining the right order for ideas can be a challenging task because there are often several different ways to arrange your thoughts. To find the most effective pattern, you might have to think of several different possibilities before deciding which is best. It is important to devote some time and attention to examining all the pieces and figuring out how to fit them together, for your organizational structure (or the lack of it) can make or break your paper.
Prewriting should include the creation of a main idea statement that will keep your writing focused on just one point. Next, you will need to determine the best framework for arranging your thoughts about your main idea. You begin to create this framework when you examine your main idea statement and your prewriting (brainstorming, freewriting, cluster, or whatever you used) and go through a three-step process to decide on what information to include and what order to put it in:
- Step 1: Circle ideas and information that match your main idea statement, and ignore or cross out ideas that seem irrelevant.
- Step 2: Group similar ideas and information together.
- Step 3: Decide on the best way to put these groups of ideas in order.
Creating an outline of your ideas before you write will benefit you by helping you keep the overall big picture in mind as you concentrate on the smaller details. It will also prevent you from:
- straying from your main point and including information or ideas that are irrelevant
- rambling or jumping from thought to thought in a manner that confuses the reader
- mixing different kinds of information together
- discussing an idea in the wrong place
There are different types of outline. When you think of an outline, you may picture one that includes Roman numerals. A formal outline uses some combination of Roman numerals, letters, and/or Arabic numbers. If an outline is not required for your assignment, and you are creating one as a tool for yourself, then you are free to use a less formal method. Informal types of outlines can take the form of brief lists of ideas in the order in which you want to discuss them.
When people object to creating an outline prior to writing, their argument is usually along the lines of this: they think they will save time by skipping the outline and just working out their organization as they write. But failing to outline actually adds time. When you do not spend time determining and writing down a plan of organization before you start, you force your brain to juggle two challenging mental tasks (organizing and composing) at the same time.
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Content adapted from the open course titled “Open Now Developmental English” authored by Cengage Learning, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.