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Basic outlining
Learn to turn "Oh, yuck!" to "Oh, yeah!"

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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.
    • Formal outlines use a standardized system of symbols that freak students out.

    • Informal outlines can be made entirely without symbols to make levels of ideas; the grid is enough.

    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
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    Photo Credit:
    Scrunched Eyes
    by Juliaf

     

    English teachers make outlines. Normal people make plans.
    ~Linda Aragoni

     

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