9 Creating an outline

General

It is important to think from the beginning of your project about the structure of your final report, both in terms of the macro-structure (overall structure or chapters) as well as micro-structure (structure of each chapter).

At the beginning: Don’t write – think!

Why create an outline? There are many reasons; but in general, it may be helpful to create an outline if you want to show the hierarchical relationship or logical ordering of information. Creating an outline:

• aids in the process of writing
• helps you organize your ideas
• presents your material in a logical form
• shows the relationship among ideas in your writing

It is worth investing enough time in such an outline as it makes the actual writing much more efficient.

Possible procedure to create an outline:

• Brainstorm: List all ideas that you want to include
• Organize: Group related ideas together
• Order: Arrange material in subsections from general to specific or from abstract to concrete.
• Label: Create main and subheadings

What does an (detailed) outline look like?

Universities often demand the submission of a detailed outline. They usually have the character of a table of contents, showing the overall structure and chapters with informative titles. The content of each chapter is presented in keywords, and also includes sources or any visualisation. In Kontext 1,  you need to indicate an estimation of how long each chapter is to show the weight of information.

Exposé and project proposal

A full-sentence outline, sometimes also called Exposé, is relevant for longer papers (e.g. Bachelorthesis). It contains the same elements as the key-word outline but is written in full sentences. It is like a research or project proposal engineers also have to write. The main purpose of such an outline/ proposal is to gain approval to do a project. You might have to convince the recipient of your project’s value.

For more details o go to handout _ structure of a project proposal

Hierarchical headings

Headings and subheadings are signposts that help a reader get through a report without getting lost. They also reveal the hierarchical relationships within your material, enabling readers to understand the various levels of importance in your work. For the writer of a report or thesis it is significant to think about this hierarchy very early because it helps to distinguish between main ideas and sub-divisions of this main idea. The next level in the hierarchy could be examples or other details. The example is adapted from Morley and Ganobcsik-Williams (n.d.):

Activity for writing outlines

The complexity of the structure depends on the topic. It is useful to study the structure of reports similar to the one you are about to write. They can be models if you understand the rationale of their structure. See also the section on structure of academic texts.