A writing skeleton™ makes it easy to
Teach how to make an outline

You can teach students how to make an outline for a five-paragraph essay or three-point speech easily.

The trick is to have students start with a working thesis statement and build a writing skeleton™ from that working thesis.

By changing the terminology you use to explain ELA concepts, you can overcome much of students' reluctance to engage in strategic planning process tasks and other writing activities.

Students are more willing to learn how to make an outline than to learn how to write one. As long as they don't hear the term frightening outline, students have no difficulty putting their plans on an outline grid.

Students associate verbs like make, do, construct, build, and craft with activities that are much more fun than writing.

Start with a working thesis

A working thesis is a sentence containing a topic and an assertion set out in simple subject-verb order without any frills. No introductory clauses, qualifiers, or any compound elements should be in the working thesis. Just use simple syntax, like this:

Computers can hurt you.

Let me show you how easy it is to turn that working thesis into a powerful, three-sentence outline I call a writing skeleton™. I'm going to put some of the text in color so you can see the parts easily. That's a trick that helps less verbal learners identify the elements they need to attend to.

Then make a writing skeleton™

To make a writing skeleton™ from a working thesis, follow these directions:

1) Replace the period in the working thesis with the word because. That leaves you with a sentence fragment:

Computers can hurt you because

2) Make three copies of that sentence fragment.

Computers can hurt you because

Computers can hurt you because

Computers can hurt you because

3) Pretend there is a blank after each occurrence of the word because. Fill in each blank to make a complete sentence.

The result is a simple sentence outline containing the topic sentences of three body paragraphs that support the thesis statement. It looks something like this:

Computers can hurt you because computers can cause eyestrain.

Computers can hurt you because computers can cause repetitive stress injury to hands.

Computers can hurt you because computers can cause neck and back strain.

In other words, students have a three-point sentence outline in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

The three-point outline works for all sorts of communications. It can be used for the academic five-paragraph essay, emails, reports, books, etc. It is also the basic outline for public speakers.

Once students have learned how to make an outline by preparing a writing skeleton™, they can help each other plan their essays orally with guidance from Talk It Out questions for thesis-and-support writing projects.

Need to see another example of a 3-point outline? Click here. Or see how to put flesh on the skeleton using ripple strategy.