Create outline as paper skeleton
A fast, efficient, morale-boosting trick

I can create an outline — a sentence outline — for a five paragraph essay on an assigned topic in two shakes of a lamb's tail. So can your students.

This is one idea your students will love.

I call this technique a writing skeleton™. My students call it the most useful thing they learned in my classes.

Idea-generating techniques

What techniques for generating ideas do you teach your students? Brainstorming? Mind-mapping? Free-writing?

All are useful. I use them myself. But I don't use them the way the English textbooks recommend.

Idea-generating techniques turn up useful ideas more quickly if the starting point is a thesis statement than if the starting point is merely a topic.

Let me show you the difference between generating ideas about a topic and generating ideas about a thesis. If you need a refresher on the thesis-topic distinction, click here.

Inefficient idea-generation

Suppose the writing topic is wifflets. Alison might brainstorm for an hour on the topic of wifflets and come up with a list of subtopics: wifflet uses, wifflet manufacturing, laws about wifflet, types of wifflet, costs of wifflet, latest wifflet technology.

After her hour's work, Alison has created seven more writing topics from her original topic, but she still has nothing to say about wifflets. She'll need another session at least before she comes up with a thesis statement. After that she still has to put in more time to create an outline before she can begin writing her five paragraph essay.

That strategy isn't going to go over well with your ADHD kids, is it?

Efficient idea generation uses thesis

By contrast, Britt starts out by picking a thesis statement more or less out of the air. How? by treating her topic as the subject of a sentence and adding a predicate.

Britt picks "Wifflets should be prohibited on the Bigger City High School campus."

Then Britt brainstorms reasons for believing that thesis. She may have only a superficial knowledge of wifflets, but in a short amount of time, Britt can come up with several potential supporting ideas that she can phrase as complete sentences. Britt can create an outline by putting those sentences in some logical order.

The neat trick that makes the writing skeleton™ so good for beginning writers is that each point of the skeleton contains the thesis statement and a reason for believing the thesis to be true. It is almost impossible for a student to wander off track when composing work planned with a writing skeleton™.

Bewildered? I've an example that shows how to create an outline of the writing skeleton™ variety from that thesis.

Next steps for writers

To create outline without spending a week at it is intoxicating for struggling writers. However, getting those three or four sentences on paper is only a first step in the expository writing process. Writers have to do some more thinking and digging to find out whether there is evidence to support those points.

Maybe they'll discover the thesis statement isn't even valid. Oh, woe!

Despite all that could go wrong, writers who have been able to create outline in a few minutes have time to spend on other things.

One of those things may be their other English assignments — but don't count on it. It's more likely to be soccer practice or MySpace. You can't win 'em all.