Basic outlining is basic planning.
Students hate writing outlines — they think it's a weird English
teacher thing — but they don't mind making plans. Everybody
makes plans.
If you want kids to plan their writing, you have to make planning
writing seems both normal and easy. Skip the educator
lingo (like outline and graphic organizer) and get
right to the serious business of revealing the order, importance,
and relationships of ideas.
An outline is a grid.
An outline is nothing more than a simple grid of columns and
rows. You can teach basic outlining without ever using any of
the jargon that make students wrinkle up their noses.
Line length shows the importance of an idea: the
longer the line, the more important the idea.
Subordinate ideas are indented below the idea(s) to which
they relate.
Your students are probably already familiar with the use of grids
to organize ideas. Grids are often used as navigational aides
in tables of contents and in online forums or chat room posting
lists.
Outlines don't need Roman numerals.
Sentence outlines are best for beginners
Unlike topic outlines, sentence outlines indicate the purpose
for writing.
Unlike topic outlines, sentence outlines indicate the relationships
of the ideas as well as their order and relative importance.
Unlike topic outlines, sentence outlines force writers to specify
what they will say on a specific topic.
The mind map, another common graphic organizer for writing,
has limitations similar to those of a topic outline with the added
problem that mind maps don't show the order in which ideas should
be discussed.
The writing skeleton™
A writing skeleton™ is a basic
outlining strategy for making a sentence outline for writing
from a working thesis statement.
Testing a writing skeleton™
lets a writer see if is likely to produce a decent piece of writing
at a stage when an entire rewrite involves no more than four sentences.
Writers can expand a writing skeleton™ into a comprehensive writing plan by
inserting evidence summaries under their respective points.
If you tackle basic outlining as a planning tool, making it seem
as easy as scribbling on the back of an envelope (which it is!),
students will have no difficulty learning how it's done.
created 02-Jul-2008; updated: 18-Sep-2008
