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 seem 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 best for beginners
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Unlike topic outlines, sentence outlines indicate the purpose
for writing.
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Unlike topic outlines, sentence outlines indicate the relationships
of the ideas as well as their order and relative importance.
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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.
Writing skeleton™ ties body to thesis
A writing skeleton™ is my
trademarked scheme that connects each body paragraph topic sentence
to the thesis of the piece of writing to create
an outline.
Creating an outline as
a writing skeleton™ lets a writer see if the thesis 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 in the outline
template.
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.
