Tuesday April 5, 2022; 8:21 PM EDT
- Everybody knows the answer to that question, sure, well, kind of, but not really.#
- Schools used to teach outlining as a way to plan a piece of writing. I tend to use an outline as the actual place where I do the writing, thinking, and revising, because the software is built for that. When people talk about writing and outlines, they can mean a good number of different things. Saying so the other day brought a couple of other examples forward on Twitter.#
- As a teacher, @ReasonedWriting uses outlines in a pretty particular and sophisticated way.#
- And @DaveWiner mentioned one of the ways he uses outlines, which is to think through and organize the content of a presentation.#
- (Both writers said more in generous follow-up tweets.)#
- So we have a noun, outline, and a verb, outline, and a composing tool called an outliner. Other composing tools will indent and toss down some bullet points, but they really don't seem very interested in the question of outlines. That's all part of the uncertainty in speaking of outlines. #
- I liked the different kinds of outlines and uses being mentioned in that Twitter thread, and that made me think we need names for outlines that serve very different uses. Schools usually used to ask for simple-minded topics listed in a sensible order, maybe with indenting for the details. Maybe we should think of that as a rudimentary planning outline.#
- The planning outline @ReasonedWriting describes involves a lot more thought about the relationships in the content, which he describes in some detail in follow-up tweets in the thread. This kind of outlining is at least as much process as product, and it reflects higher order mental activity. It deserves its own name.#
- And a sophisticated planning outline edges toward the act of writing itself, which if it is carried out in an outliner software tool can weave composing, ordering, and revising together from start to finish. That also probably needs a name.#
- And a further step is the fine-grained work of organizing, finding, and revealing the relationship between one sentence and the next, one phrase and the next. That is a refinement of skill and thought that the rudimentary school outline is oblivious to.#
- For example, should there be an "and" or a "but" or other logical linking word between two adjoining sentences? That's a kind of organizing of thought and argument, but is it useful to think of it as part of the more sophisticated sorts of outlining? I don't honestly know. I'm tempted to say yes.#
- I suppose part of the lesson here is that the best of our #toolsforthought can be used in very rudimentary or very sophisticated ways. Can be built to encourage the one or the other. Can be taught so as to encourage the one or the other. Can focus on the product, a particular outline, or on the process of clarifying something so as to make a credible outline. Can go even further: composing with that outlining/clarifying/organizing process still underway because we think about writing that way and perhaps because the composing tool also supports it. Supports the unified process of finding credible structure, composing, and revising for greater clarity and sophistication of thought. #
- If outlining includes all of those things, then placing an and or a but between two sentences is part of outlining. Still, maybe there could be a few more words to describe this whole scene. @ReasonedWriting said, yes, a taxonomy!#