Ditch the Outline

By Catharine Bramkamp

Many writers and educators and books  offer various ideas and methods to organize your essays.  There are rules, the authors and experts explain; writers should make meticulous outlines, create notes, organize, shuffle, and double down.

You remember these rules?  Or have you cleverly blocked out all that ponderous and repetitive advice on how to create a long essay?

Let me remind you then: A long time ago, in a land far, far away, the good essay – the essay that earned the A in the class – was the one written with an outline. The outline was a closed system; there was no room for creative interpretation. Outlines were all about the rules.

In the perfect outline, each topic was labeled with Roman numerals I, II and III.  Each sub-heading was listed with a capital Arabic letter A, B, C.  Then the sub sub-headings of the topic were created with those i , ii and iii, then if there was more to say, the lower case a., b. and c. I’d tell you what was supposed to be listed under a., b. or c. but I never, ever drilled an outline down that far.

The complimentary method to the elaborate outline was the three-by-five index card.  Each separate thought was to be written on those index cards. Then apparently, with the help of the cumbersome outline system, you shuffled the cards; labeled them with letters and roman numerals and voila your essay is complete. Now all you have to do is type it up.

The key word to this whole process and system is type.

The inherent problem with the outline/index card system is that it doesn’t address or acknowledge the reality of the current technology. The above ideas are linked to the technology of the typewriter not to the computer or even word processor.

Creating a final paper on a typewriter is fraught with drama and more often: frustration. There is one opportunity to get it right on a typewriter, to do so, all the required information needed to be complete, accurate and available. Even the most advance typewriter had limited back space/white-out capacity. It was possible, mind you, to use liquid white out to delete and re-type whole paragraphs, or so I’ve heard. But at that point, the whole page needed to be retyped.   Think of that, retyping a whole page, not just cutting and pasting to a new document.

Fortunately things have change. Correction fluid dabs much more smoothly on a computer screen.

In light of the current technology, to suggest that you work out your essay using three-by-five cards is analogous to suggesting that you catch fish using a spear. You can do it of course, and some people prefer to catch fish with a spear because that’s what they know (or you are part of the aboriginal spear-caught fishing movement where all fish needs to be killed by spear because it tastes better and is more humane for the fish. Movements like that always seem to start up in the Bay Area); but a modern fly-fishing system is more efficient and has different tools.

You have permission to dig out the last of your index cards and throw them at the fish.

Ninety nine percent of all writers compose on the computer – and if they don’t directly compose, they are just working on drafts in long hand, not organizing a final paper in long hand.

Composing on the computer is faster and more fluid. You can write as fast as you can and then arrange the paragraphs in the order that makes the most sense – there’s your outline.  You can pull your quotes and sources and cut and paste them into separate pages or paragraphs and store them in a labeled file on the desktop – there are your index cards and your notes.

So before you beat yourself up and worry that you never could figure out how to create an outline, know that you can compose without it.

And you can relegate the roman numerals to Super Bowl announcements.

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From Don’t Write Like You Talk: A Smart Girl’s Guide to Writing and Editing (3L Publishing)

Catharine Bramkamp holds two degrees in English, published  hundreds of newspaper and magazines articles, a handful of novels and two essays in the Chicken Soup for  the  Soul anthologies. She is an adjunct professor of writing for two colleges and is a successful writing coach.    Visit her at www.YourBookStartsHere.com