Katy Peplin Katy Peplin

AcWriMo: a new (to me!) kind of outline

i love an outline - i'm definitely on the record with that! but also it can be really hard to outline text that isn't written yet, especially if you're the kind of thinker and writer where those activities happen concurrently. 

a community member (shout out to katie!) introduced me to this "inquiry based" outline and i'm obsessed! basically, the idea is that you start to structure your argument with the main questions that you have around your central argument, and you use those (and follow up!) questions to start to section out parts of the writing. 

you can use the clickable and fillable outline here - a big thank you to Dr. Alan Kilma - his website is academicmuse.org but it looks like it's been dormant for a few years while he....writes fiction? cool! 

what i love the most about this tool - and any variations you might experiment with yourself - is that your organize the writing around the questions that you're answering with your writing. so many of us will research and read and research and read until we've "answered" everything, but i have been trying for years and never gotten to the "everything answered" stage!! so this helps you start to see the structure earlier, or at least one possible structure, which in turn helps you put some boundaries around what you will and won't investigate during your research process. 


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outlines are magic: a March Madness post

has it been a while since you made an outline? that makes sense! this is a typical “learn to write” exercise that can feel rote, or even too simple for a complex academic piece.

but outlines are magic for a few reasons! i strongly recommend them to all my clients, and here are just a few of the reasons why!

outlines are also a really good way to organize information. when you are in the midst of a big research project, it can be really overwhelming to start to say "okay, these things belong in this category of ideas” or “these these ideas relate to this section here." an outline can help give you a place to put those information, those ideas as they assemble themselves into a document so that you don't lose them. it also is a great active note-taking activity for those heavy research seasons!

so rather than a process that looks like:

  • read all the things

  • flail around

  • start to write

  • look around for what you read to put it in

it can look more like

  • read a thing

  • take some notes

  • put that thing in an outline, if it’s relevant

  • read more things

  • adjust outline

who cares if you end up moving things around? it’s so much easier to move things around in an outline than it is to restructure a 60 page zero draft. this way, you’re keeping an eye on what you want to produce while you’re researching, which also makes it a little more likely that you won’t over or under research as much, as well.


the other thing that outlines gonna be really, really useful for is giving you a list of tasks to complete. so many of my clients come to me and say, "okay, I've had '[write chapter' on my list to do for the last week and I don't know where to start. I don't know what that means. I look at it on my to do list. I'm so overwhelmed!"

an outline can actually help you naturally break down that big task as you start to draft this chapter into smaller pieces that you can put on into it to do list, and break into more manageable chunks.

if you have the introduction of your chapter outline, and you know that there are four bullet points and there are three bullet sub points underneath each one of those main points, then you can say: "today I want to write up the first bullet point, all three of the sub points today.” this is much easier to wrap your mind around than "write the introduction to this chapter." the outline can help you start to see the smaller steps and then take them, which, as we know, could be a lot less intimidating.

plus, despite what you may have heard, an outline IS writing. it helps you organize information, it brings together your original thinking and your research - of course it counts! an outline can feel less intimidating that starting with a first, or even a zero draft. so experiment with using them to see if they can help you visualize the small steps of your project just a little bit better.

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