A text written without an outline is like a stream of consciousness. It is impossible to grasp the central idea and extremely difficult to follow the development of thought. Such a text has the right to live in fiction, but it is unacceptable in business or science. Making outlines are an integral part of creating an oral or written text, as it saves your time when working on a draft. The carefully thought-out outline will not allow you to get out of its topic and forget an exciting idea.
Standard Features of an Outline
An outline is a summary of the paperwork. It allows you to understand what your work will be about and what is its central idea. It also finds out the system of proofs for this idea and what conclusions the author of the work comes to. Each point of your outline should be one of the defenses of the main idea. Should you look for guidelines on preparing an outline, we have gathered a lot of helpful information in our blog.
The outline should correspond to the topic of your text and its idea. The outline value lies in the fact that:
- it reveals the formation of your writing;
- it allows you to follow the author’s thoughts and its sequence;
- the reader delves deeper into the content of the paper when drawing up his outline;
- it determines its internal logic and interrelation between issues considered in work;
- drawing up the outline helps develop the ability to write down concisely and briefly and express thoughts one by one;
- the outline mobilizes attention and helps quickly recollect what has been read.
Types of the Outline Formats
When making a good outline, it is essential to know about the types of an outline and its structure. We will consider the peculiarities of such outline formats as alphanumeric, decimal, and full-sentence.
Alphanumeric Outline
Alphanumeric outline format consists of the main points, the formulations of which are presented in a nominative form using the Roman numeral for headings. It is crucial to formulate the main idea of each paragraph. It means to find a keyword and turn it into an abstract noun combining with dependent words. It is easy to change the nominative form into interrogative and vice versa. The interrogative outline contains questions to a text (that start with ‘how,’ ‘how much,’ ‘when,’ ‘why,’ etc.).
Decimal Outline
The decimal outline format consists of the main points noted with whole numbers (1) and is divided into subheadings indicated with a decimal built (1.1.). It is the improved system that ultimately reflects the author’s work on his text. It also gives the readers a clear picture of the logic and composition of the work. A text should be divided into the compositional parts: introduction, body, and conclusion. Then it is necessary to formulate the central idea, which will be the title.
Full-Sentence Outline
The full-sentence outline format is such the outline where each point is presented with a two-member sentence. It also gets the main idea of this part of a text across. This outline consists of theses of the verb system. A thesis is a summarized principal point of a paragraph, a text of a lecture, a report written in a sentence.
Knowing the Structure is Important!
Many proper text types have a clear structure, for example, the news, press releases, business correspondence, research papers. It is essential to know what structure a text should have and to follow the rules. Firstly, the readers expect instinctively that a particular style and genre will have a definite structure. Secondly, the typical structure is composed in an optimal way to solve the problem presented in the text. The sequence of work on the outline consists of:
- text reading and understanding its problem;
- division of what has been read into semantic parts;
- selecting keywords in each semantic part;
- titling semantic elements of the text.