Tools of the craft: Outlining

Outlining applications and software has never seemed particularly interesting to me. In class, students normally use the utilities already included in word processing software intended for the purpose of preparing outlines. There are, though a few interesting online options that are worth commenting here. None of them is addressed to university students and/or scholars, but they may be helpful when authors are having difficulties unveiling the links between their ideas.

1.    Thesis builder. It’s a very simple application that conflates general, supporting and opposite arguments into an outline, illustrating the relationships between them. As a bonus, it constructs good thesis statements that can be used as headings in outlines.
2.    Essay map. Ideally, this tiny tool can guide you through the whole process of outlining a text. All you need to do is feed your propositions in the text window.

Structure & harmony: Outlining (II)

Once brainstorming processes are done with, we are left with scattered blocks of ideas that we need to structure and harmonize (take a look at this curious example). Before the text is shaped, it is advisable to plan the flow of ideas as they will be presented in the composition. It is at this stage that outlines come to play an essential role.
Outlines present the structure of the text we are to write, but, most importantly, they reflect the relations we have decided to establish among out thoughts. Thus, as mentioned above, outlines purport both structure and harmony. Be means of simple visual organizers, outlines rank the sets of ideas that will be conflated into paragraphs once we compose the text. It also allows us to visually identify which ideas will control discourse blocks ad how they relate to each other.
An efficient outline should be flexible and stable, organic. It should allow us to read it through and understand where the text is headed. It is a laborious and complex task; however, once it is done, it simplifies the passage to text.
Outlines must comply with certain rules to be efficient:
1.    They must be based and developed around a thesis statement that links, transversally, all the ideas that constitute them.
2.    They consist only of affirmative propositions whose structures must be, if possible, always parallel (i.e. nominal structures, verbal structures, etc.; find an explanation and examples here).
3.    A set of number-alphabetic markers is needed to rank ideas.
Basically, outlines are prototexts that only include the raw logical expression of our thoughts organized exactly as they will appear in the first drafts. Nonetheless, some authors include cue notes between ideas to indicate how they are related, thus articulating some sort of harmony among the propositions that may be useful when producing the final text. They look like powerful promises of what is to come.