Outline! – The Holy Grail of all Organization

By Jerry Kranitz (October 8, 2024)

Are you overwhelmed by the content you’ve been tasked with creating?

Do you wish there was an easier way to ensure your content is comprehensive AND coherent?

Prepare for enlightenment…

Meeting the challenge

Are you responsible for writing documents that must clearly and concisely present complex information? Do you feel overwhelmed trying to organize and present it all coherently? Do you prepare by developing… wait for it… an Outline?

An outline is a wonderfully manageable way of organizing our thoughts in structured form. It can be little more than a short list of topics you wish to communicate. On the more complex end, it can be a hierarchical tree format. Simply put, it’s all the essential points you want to cover and the order in which information should flow.

After 28 years in the professional world, plus writing a history book and a memoir, I can testify that a solidly developed outline is the basis for all organization. It is the Holy Grail of simplifying the process of organizing our thoughts and the information we’ve been tasked with presenting.

What is an Outline?

I have fond memories of research projects and writing papers in college. That’s right, I LOVED it! I always started by listing the main points I wanted to cover, and then began my research. As I poured through my sources and took notes, I would continually develop, streamline, and rethink, my approach. And throughout this process I would refine my outline. This was all before the actual writing began.

I.  Main Topic

    A. Subtopic

         1. subtopic

         2. subtopic

    B. subtopic

II. Main Topic

And so on…

By making the outline the focus of my planning and organization, I narrowed a monumental project down to a set of considerably more manageable tasks. Instead of one massive paper, I tackled the components of my research one at a time, and then wrote multiple smaller papers.

Once I stitched the components together, I had the full paper presenting my research and findings. Easy! Ok, not easy. But infinitely more manageable and far less stressful. That’s because once I had the outline nailed down, 90% of the paper was complete. The rest was just conducting all my research and writing the paper.

It’s true! So many of my classmates, even in graduate school, would conduct all their research, and then just start typing the paper from beginning to end. That is WAY too much for any reasonable person to wrap their head around! It’s no wonder the results too often lacked focus and failed to follow a logical path.

Professional writers understand this. Freelance writer Ashley Cummings acknowledges the writer’s challenge of organizing one’s thoughts. Among her tips for avoiding a crappy first draft: Write an outline…

“If you want to get somewhere with your work, you have to plan and prepare. Don’t start writing a soliloquy. Start with the bare bones of the project, outlining the intro, main ideas, calls to action, etc.”

Freelance writer Elna Cain similarly asserts…

“Every piece of content you create should start with a basic outline.”

Writing about blog posts, Cain suggests thinking of the outline as a funnel…

“The beginning of your post is the wide part relating to the bigger picture, introducing your topic, and as it narrows down, the rest of your post is broken up into specific topics of what the whole post is about.”

Effective communication is for EVERYONE!

This does not only apply to professional writers! Everyone who communicates in writing benefits from developing an outline. And that can be as simple as just listing our ideas in advance. To be clear, when I say the communicator benefits, what I really mean is the recipients of the communication!

This includes the daily communication that too many people take for granted – Email! During my 28 years in the professional world, I was appalled (DAILY!) by the haphazard way in which people communicate via email. Nothing delays projects, and/or leads to incorrect outcomes than misunderstood communication.

I was reliant on people to communicate the status of a project, or the outcome of a meeting. And I constantly received overly detailed explanations that left my head spinning. I found myself regularly having to implore coworkers to clearly and concisely summarize!

How about a real-world example?

I’ll illustrate with a detailed example, which only gets easier with smaller content tasks. I wrote a book titled Cassette Culture: Homemade Music and the Creative Spirit in the Pre-Internet Age. The topic was how home recording artists networked with one another from the late 1970s through 1980s. Participants communicated by writing letters and sending cassette tapes back and forth through the postal service. No email or electronic file sharing.

There were multiple angles I could have approached the history from. Consequently, I had to make hard decisions about what I wanted to focus on. I started by listing the key points I wanted to cover:

I. Why did cassettes encourage creativity?

II. Networking

III. Promotion and Distribution

IV. What kinds of music and audio art were the artists recording?

The more I researched and thought about these broader topics, the more detailed my outline became. Start skeletal and build it out from there. Here’s an excerpt:

III. Part II: The Global Network Emerges… and Flourishes

     A. The Social Network

          1. How did hometapers find each other?

          2. Trading/Artist-to-artist communication

          3. Collaborations

     B. How the scene developed in different countries

     C. Promotion and Distribution

          1. Labels/Distribution

          2. Compilation tapes/Cassette magazines

          3. Radio

Getting the idea? My book is a detailed history. But the concept is the same whether you are writing a book, preparing a sales presentation, writing technical documentation, or a blog post. It can even help with the relatively simple task of writing a memo or email. You must present the information such that your communication is comprehensive and follows a logical flow. You want your audience to understand and benefit from it!

I brought these skills with me to the professional world where I authored technical documentation, user guides, memos, and sometimes got out of my techie shell to give presentations to groups of sales reps.

When I worked as a Business Systems Analyst, a project would come to me after the business requirements were complete. It was my job to make sure those business requirements were fully understood, and then transform them into Functional Requirements from which developers and the Quality Assurance team could write their code and test plans. I always started by outlining the requirements.

Full disclosure: Depending on the complexity of your content, an outline may not be simple. It can take time and considerable thought to develop. I’ve read articles about outlines that make a point of the time it takes before actual writing begins. Yes, it does take time. But the benefits far outweigh the perceived costs.

Let’s summarize the benefits of an Outline

Organization

An outline helps me organize my thoughts. At any time, my outline provides an at-a-glance view of my content.

Logical flow of information

Seeing my ideas in outline format ensures a logical, coherent relationship from one section to the next. And, crucially, it keeps me THINKING, which often necessarily leads to rethinking the direction my content will take.

Comprehensive coverage

Organizing my topics in outline form ensures that I cover all the essential points. And it helps reveal gaps that need to be filled.

Stress relief

Regardless of the project or complexity, working from an outline is SO much easier than sitting at the keyboard and beginning to type. Whether a detailed hierarchy or a simple list of topics, working from an outline requires a fraction of the brain power required if typing from beginning to end.

Your message has been RECEIVED!

What is the point of your content if the audience doesn’t fully understand it? Clear, concise, comprehensive communication will be understood. This is especially critical in a professional environment with time sensitive projects at stake.

Now you try!

Organizing your thoughts in outline form is the most effective way to ensure that whatever you have been tasked with communicating is well organized, comprehensive, flows logically, and will be understood by your audience. And it makes your life so much SIMPLER! I found it useful for this article to list the points I wanted to cover.

  1. Introduction
  2. What is an outline?
  3. My audience
  4. My experience/examples
  5. Summary of benefits
  6. Conclusion and call to action

Give it a try. Even if it’s just an email. An email sent for professional purposes must be clear, concise, and understood. Positive results are guaranteed!