Three ways to write an outline - plus one that is better than all the others

Seriously, you need an outline

If I said you don’t have to write outlines like this ever again, would that help? Photo credit: Heidi/Flickr

The heart of a well-organized writing project is an outline.

This is a surprisingly controversial statement. I know many writers hate working with an outline, and for creative projects, their reluctance is understandable.

But for team writing, some kind of outline — even if it’s just a basic set of bullet points — is essential.  

Without an outline, you’re writing aimlessly, wandering across the page, not knowing where you’re going. (This can be fun for creative writing; in business writing, it’s torture.) Without an outline, the assignment is like a monkey on your back. Without an outline, the writer you’ve given the assignment to will have no idea how to organize what they write and may well produce something that completely misses the point. Without an outline, the client has no guidance on what to expect and may well be surprised (often unpleasantly) by the draft your team eventually produces.

You can start writing without an outline but you’ll likely run into all these problems and maybe others. Even if the outline is quickly done and you only share it with a small number of people — or even if it’s just for yourself — writing an outline is the simplest way I know of to make writing easier, faster, and to get a better-finished product at the end.

The outline turns an assignment from a bear into a beautiful racehorse, from a headwind into a tailwind. 

Three basic ways of outlining

There are several different kinds of outlines, so getting clear about what might work best for your team is helpful.

• Formal multi-level outline with Roman numerals, capital letters, etc.

• Informal multi-level outline with bullets and sub-bullets

• A simple single-level list of bullets

The formal outline is something that most of us learned in school. It goes something like this:

I. You start with Roman numerals for the top-level headings.
   A. Next-level headings use capital letters.
       1. Then you switch to Arabic numerals.
            a. And maybe even lowercase letters for fourth-level headings.
       2. It’s relatively easy to see how ideas and sub-ideas group together.
   B. But sometimes it can feel a little laborious filling all this out.
II. And by the time you get to the end …
   A. You might feel like you’re filling out a form.
   B. Especially if you want to make sure every section has at least two sub-points.

Needless to say, this is not the most useful approach for most practical content creation. If you’re producing an academic paper or a very structured piece of long-form content, such as a textbook or a user manual, this kind of formal outline can help make a complex structure clear. But for most projects under a few thousand words, this kind of approach is overkill. Besides, its formality induces a kind of stiffness, and it’s easy to lose any sense of narrative flow.

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Three ways to write an outline - plus one that is better than all the others