SECTION Three -- Organizing Papers: Aids to Organizing: Outlines

What sort of writer are you? If your papers read as if you’re mechanically ticking off points one, two, three, then perhaps you’re being cramped by your outlines and should use them more flexibly. If your papers — particularly the longer ones—are criticized for being disorganized, you probably need to try outlining, in your head or on paper, before you write. But never let an outline freeze a paper. As you write, always be prepared to move away from your plan. The act of writing down one recollection may spark another that throws a different light on the event; a new example may point toward a conclusion quite unlike the one that originally seemed logical. Whenever you have to choose between following your outline and following your ideas, go with your ideas. Change your outline. Keep your mind open and active.

Types of Outlines

The working outline (or scratch outline or informal out line) is a private affair—fluid, subject to constant revision, made without attention to form, and destined for the wastebasket. But enough working outlines have been retrieved from wastebaskets that something can be said about them.

A working outline usually begins with a few phrases and some descriptive details or examples. From them grow fragmentary statements, tentative generalizations, hypotheses. One or two of these take on prominence, shaping into the main ideas that seem worth developing. New examples bring to mind new ideas, and these find a place in the list of phrases, canceling out some of the original ones. The writer keeps adding and subtracting, juggling and shifting, until he has his key points in an order that makes sense to him. He scribbles a sentence, works in a transition, adds examples.

Depending on his habits, he may discard his working outline as soon as it has served the purpose of getting the direction and shape of his essay clear to him. Or he may keep it beside him as he writes, checking off points as he covers them, rejecting those that prove unsatisfactory, taking out time to rethink and reorder before finishing the first draft. By then, if he has kept expanding and correcting it, his outline comes close to being a rough summary of the essay itself.

Here, minus crossings-out, arrows, and general untidiness, is a worldng outline for a paper about the impact of Alex Haley’s bestselling book Roots and the very popular television production that was based on it.

How explain the enormous appeal of Roots? Awakened longing for sense of heritage.

Haley’s story, beginning with amazing search, captured imagination of millions.

A few clues led to uncovering of long-buried facts that the author made into a gripping story.

Really three stories in Roots—Kunta Kinte and succeeding generations, the black experience in America generally, and Haley’s search.

Publishers and TV producers were sure they had a hit on their hands.

First printing of 200,000 copies.

TV production cost $6 million for 8-episode series shown on consecutive nights.

Results outdid expectations. A million copies of book in print five months after publication. TV series drew 130,000,000 viewers.

Good effect on U.S. race relations. New sense of identity, pride for blacks. For whites, new understanding of blacks, new appreciation of their history.

Upsurge of interest in genealogy. Blacks and whites hungry for knowledge of own roots.

Where the working outline is ragged, the formal outline is tidily schematic. Though not necessarily a public affair, it may be; and when it’s intended for eyes other than the writer’s, it should observe certain conventions. Some of these conventions make the formal outline more remote from the actual paper than the working outline is. Following the title, for example, stands a thesis statement, which may or may not appear in the paper and, if it does, may or may not occur at the beginning. The outline itself passes over introductory and transitional material as well as most illustrations and restatements. In its final version it reflects a process of logical division. The statement of the thesis is broken down into its parts, each represented in the outline by a main heading. These main heads are in turn analyzed into their parts, with subdivisions indented to show relationships of coordination and subordination. Theoretically, the subdividing can go on indefinitely; practically, it’s rarely carried beyond the third level. On the logical principle that division always produces at least two units, no single subdivision (a 1 without a 2 or an a without a b) is permitted in the formal outline.

Following are two versions of the formal outline — the topic outline and the sentence outline—both based on parts of the paper we saw taking shape in the working outline above. The versions overlap: the topic outline covers the first three of the four sections of the paper; the sentence outline covers the last two. Note that the topic outline uses phrases or words for heads; the sentence outline uses complete sentences. In both, logically parallel ideas are presented in matching grammatical structures. First, the topic outline:

Roots: Not One Man’s Story

The dramatic account of one man’s successful search for his roots fascinated millions and inspired thousands to begin investigating their own.

I. The search: a story in itself

A. Few clues

1. Grandmother’s stories

2. Names from the past

B. Sources

1. Scholars, museums, ships’ manifests, libraries

2. African tribesmen and 9 riots

3. One memorable voyage

II. The book

A. A mixture of fact and fiction

1. 2500 items of information

2. Factual errors

3. Psychological re-creation

B. A spellbinder

1. Chronicle of Kunta Kinte and his descendants

2. Panorama of black life in America

3. Saga of Haley’s search

III. The TV series

A. Elements of success

1. Good story

2. Lots of publicity

3. Big production budget

4. Decision to show episodes on consecutive nights

B. Phenomenal response

1. 130 million viewers

2. Zooming book sales

3. Fame for author

The sentence outline:

III. The TV dramatization brought the story into millions of homes.

A. It was almost assured of success.

1. It had a story that offered excitement, sentiment, romance, melodrama.

2. It was given extensive promotional tie4n with the book.

3. It was allotted a production budget of $6 million.

4. It was presented on consecutive nights to hold viewer interest.

B. The success it achieved was beyond expectation.

1. It attracted 130 million viewers.

2. It spurred tremendous demand for the book.

3. It made Haley a celebrity.

IV. Roots’ phenomenal impact was both personal and social.

A. Response to the TV version was biracial.

1. Both blacks and whites said that Roots on TV made them see the reality of the black experience.

a. It gave both a greater appreciation of black history.

b. Among blacks, it spurred a sense of pride and identity.

c. It made many whites more sensitive to the black situation.

2. It led to new discussions of racial questions.

a. Its success caused newspapers and magazines to reexamine the state of race relations in America.

b. As a national event, it became a natural topic for discussion whenever people came together.

B. The fascination of Roots’ theme is universal.

1. The average American longs for a sense of heritage.

a. All of us—regardless of race—want to know who we are and where we came from.

b. We want to trace our roots—not to uncover distinguished forebears but to learn about the ordinary people most of us are descended from.

2. Roots sparked an upsurge of interest in genealogy.

a. Inquiries for information to libraries and the National Archives doubled or tripled.

b. Schools had students search out their family trees as course projects.

c. Tourist offices geared up to help travelers search out family connections while abroad.

3. The appeal of Roots was linked to the growing interest in social history.

a. Historians were placing new emphasis on reconstructing the behavior, culture, and quality of life of ordinary persons.

b. At least 250 college courses immediately adopted Roots as a textbook.

== For Writing:

Complete the topic outline by converting into topics the heads in section IV of the sentence outline.

The topic outline is the usual choice if you’re preparing an outline to accompany a short or medium-long paper. A sentence outline is always the best choice for long papers, especially reference papers, when you plan to ask your instructor for advice and criticism before proceeding with the project. Because the ideas are expressed in complete sentences, inconsistencies and lapses in logical progression are more obvious in the sentence outline than in the topic outline or the working outline. And the need to write complete sentences forces you to examine the purpose of each paragraph or other subdivision of your paper. Though a sentence outline takes time to prepare, it re mains the most informative of all outlines for the writer as well as for the reader.

Testing Organization

Whether or not they find it helpful to prepare an outline in the prewriting stage, most writers would probably agree that reducing a completed essay or article to an outline is an excellent way to expose its structure and test the progression of ideas. Making a detailed outline on the model of the sentence outline is the surest means of gaining control of any difficult reading you’re assigned. And making an outline, however rough, of your own papers is one of the best ways to determine whether they have genuine unity and continuity. For this purpose, begin by making a paragraph-by-paragraph summary (a sentence for each paragraph is enough).

Unless your paper is very short, this first step will make clear that not all your paragraphs are of equal importance. It will also show you that many of your paragraphs fall into groups, each of which performs one main function in the total scheme. Bracket the sentences representing such paragraph sequences, to show that the block as a whole is one of the parts into which your paper is divided, and compose a sentence that states the point of each of these stages in the discussion. Indent the sentences that state secondary points.

A paper twelve to fifteen paragraphs long may fall into three or four sequences of closely related paragraphs, connected either by transitional paragraphs or by transitional sentences that stand at the end of one sequence or the beginning of the next. Ending with almost as many parts—that is, major headings—as you have paragraphs suggests that you should consider reducing the number of points you’re making, concentrating on the most significant and developing them in paragraph sequences.

Once you’ve made this rough approximation of a sentence outline, including the formal statement of a thesis, you can move quickly to close gaps, improve sequences, and in general give your rewrite a stronger, firmer organization. Unquestionably, bad papers are sometimes written from splendid outlines; but accurate outlining does expose structural weaknesses, and exposure clears the way for intelligent revision.

• For Writing:

Write a paper on how, at this stage in the course, you go about writing a paper. Before you begin the final draft, test the organization of what you’ve written by outlining it, using the sentence outline as a model for the format. Now write your final draft, taking into account what your outline has told you about the unity and progression of your paper. Turn in both versions of the paper as well as the sentence outline.

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