The Outline Demystified by Moira Allen (Non-Fiction)

 The Outline Demystified
 

by Moira Allen

 

I  don't know any writer who likes the prospect of creating an outline. That's probably because we all remember being taught that horrible "1,2,3 -- A,B,C" format in high school. (Hands up, everyone who used to get around those exercises by writing a paper first, and then creating the outline after the paper was done?) Relax -- I'm not going to "teach" that kind of outline.

An outline is simply a way to construct a road map of where you want to go with your article. Another way to look at an outline is to think of it as a filing cabinet. When you research your article, you're going to gather a lot of information. How will you know what to put in and what to leave out? By creating an "outline" that, in a sense, places "headers" on the files in your cabinet, you'll know whether the information you've gathered fits into the "files" that you have -- or whether it doesn't. If you don't have a "file" for that information, chances are that the information doesn't belong in your article.

For example, when I decided to go "full-time" as a freelancer in 1996, one of the first articles I pitched was a piece on "cancer in cats." I chose to write the article because my own cat had recently died of cancer. When I got the assignment, I roughed out the areas I planned to cover:

• Types of cancer
• Breed-specific cancers
• How to detect cancer
• My experience with a cat with cancer
• Preventing cancer
• Treatments
• Hope for the future
• Hi-tech treatments
• Diagnostic techniques

A quick look at this list showed me that some ideas were actually sub-categories of others. "Breed-specific cancers" fit under "types of cancer," while "diagnostic techniques" fit under "how to detect." "Hope for the future" fit under "treatments." One category also stood out as not fitting with the rest: "My own experience." I ended up with four "file folders" to work with:

• Types of Cancer
• Detecting Cancer
• Treating Cancer
• Preventing Cancer

This, by the way, is an outline. It can be as simple as that. Besides serving as a framework for my article, it provided a framework for my research: I knew what types of questions I had to ask, based on the information I wanted to include. I researched the article on the Web and by interviewing experts, asking questions based on my four topic areas -- and "filing" that information in the appropriate place. If information came in that didn't fit into one of these four areas, I knew that it probably didn't belong in my article.

I also had a slant or "core concept" -- "What you need to know about cancer in cats." (Note how a slant can make a great title: "Is your cat at risk of cancer?" or "How you can reduce your cat's risk of cancer.")

Having that core concept or slant is essential. It tells you what is vital to your article -- what is at the center of your idea -- and what isn't. If you have information or thoughts that don't relate directly to the core concept, then that information probably doesn't belong in the article.

Five Ways to Approach the Outline

I'm no fan of the "1,2,3 -- A,B,C" approach to outlines. This approach tends to get one bogged down in the mechanics -- Is this a subset of #2? Should I move this section here? There are easier ways to put your ideas and information in order.

1) Ask yourself what questions a reader would ask. What would a reader want to know about this subject? Make a list of those questions. For example, a reader interested in cancer in cats might want to know:

• How common is cancer in cats?
• What kinds of cancer affect cats?
• What cats are at greatest risk?
• How can I tell if my cat has cancer?
• What can I do if my cat has cancer?
• What kinds of treatments are available to me?
• What are their success rates?
• What are their risks to my cat?
• How long will my cat live if it has cancer?
• Can I prevent my cat from getting cancer?
• Where do I go to get more help?

Sometimes, simply jotting down a list of questions is all you need to define the basic areas your article will cover, and even the order in which you might wish to cover them.

2) Think in "subheads." Most published articles are divided into sections with subheads. This is a good way to organize your information (and putting in your own subheads always pleases an editor). The four "file folders" that I developed for my feline cancer piece would also serve very nicely as subheads:

• Is your cat at risk?
• Protecting your cat from cancer
• Detecting the signs of cancer
• Choosing a treatment plan

Subheads help you organize your information logically. You'll also be able to determine whether your article is "in balance." If you have 250 words under one subhead and 1000 under another, chances are you need to reorganize the article.

3) List events or concepts chronologically. What happened first? What happened next? What happened after that? What happened last? This approach works well for an article that focuses on events that occurred over time -- e.g., a historical piece, a personal profile, etc. For example, women's magazines often publish stories of how a family coped with a child's illness. A chronological outline of such an article might look like this:

1. Family notices something isn't right with the child
2. Family goes to traditional doctor
3. Family gets reassurances, goes home
4. Child gets worse
5. Family seeks more help; gets more reassurances
6. Child gets worse
7. Family gets desperate; seeks more information
8. Family finds special doctor/support group/information on line
9. Family locates specialist/special treatment/new cure
10. Family is warned of risks of treatment
11. Family goes ahead with treatment
12. Child gets better

4) List points in logical order. Many how-to articles have an obvious logical order: Do this first, do this next, do this next, and do this last. Your outline here may consist simply of a list of things to do, and the order in which the reader should do them. This works well for a how-to article, for example.

A travel article might also have a logical order, based on the order in which one would see or visit a location. If, for example, you'd start at Point A and travel to Point X, a logical way to present your information is in the order in which the traveler following your route would encounter it. This works even for a single location: Trace the route a traveler would take if walking through a site, such as a castle or museum.

5) Make a list. List all the pieces of information that you'd like to include in the article. Then, go over that list and assign numbers to each item based on its importance or priority. For example, if you're writing a piece on ways to improve communication between spouses, jot down a list of all the suggestions you want to cover. Which tips are most important? Which are less important? Which could be omitted without any real harm to your article? You may find, when you're done, that you have a selection of key points, and perhaps a few "leftovers" that aren't as useful. In some cases, your list may become the actual structure of your finished article ("Five ways to improve communication with your spouse"); in others, it may become the "hidden" structure that underlies your piece, even though you aren't numbering the points in the final article.

Once you've mastered a few alternatives to the classic, hated approach to outlines, you'll find that organizing your material -- and your article -- is even easier than A,B,C!

Excerpted from "Starting Your Career as a Freelance Writer."

  Copyright © 2003 Moira Allen.

 

About the Author 

Moira Allen is the editor of Writing-World.com, and has written nearly 400 articles, serving as a columnist and regular contributor for such publications as The Writer, Entrepreneur, Writer's Digest, and Byline. An award-winning writer, Allen is the author of eight books, including Starting Your Career as a Freelance Writer, The Writer's Guide to Queries, Pitches and Proposals, and Writing to Win: The Colossal Guide to Writing Contests. In addition to Writing-World.com, Allen hosts VictorianVoices.net, a growing archive of articles from Victorian periodicals, and The Pet Loss Support Page, a resource for grieving pet owners. She lives in Maryland with her husband and the obligatory writer's cat.

Moira Allen Books at Amazon

Becoming Your Own Editor by Moira Allen (Non-Fiction)

 Becoming Your Own Editor

by Moira Allen

 

Writers speculate a lot about what editors really do. Some firmly believe that editors are the final barricade between writers' excellent manuscripts and publication. Others seem to believe that the job of an editor is to clean up after writers and tell them what to do next.

To a certain extent, the latter is true. When a manuscript comes along that is so magnificent that no amount of typos can detract from its impact, many editors will clean it up, and gladly. Usually, though, they must weigh whether such "clean up" time will be justified by the final product. More often than not, the answer is no.

You can avoid this answer, however. If you follow these four easy steps, your editor will be able to judge your work using the criteria that really count: Its content and style. Better yet, you'll never have to wonder again about what an editor does, because you'll be doing it yourself!

Step 1: Get to the Point.

The first thing an editor wants to learn from your manuscript is its purpose. What is the story you are going to tell, and why? Why is it important? Don't shroud your purpose in three or four cleverly written but pointless opening paragraphs.

If you're writing a story about Old Sam, a three-legged border collie who was the most unforgettable dog you've ever met, don't start your article with this kind of opener:

"When I got out of college with a few courses of animal science under my belt, I had little idea how bleak the job outlook would be. I wandered from clinic to clinic, but no work was to be had. Then my old buddy Joe, who owned a sheep ranch out on South Fork Road, offered me a job as a stablehand..."

This sort of opener may ramble on just like buddy Joe's ranch before the author finally gets to the point: "And that's where I met Old Sam." All of this information may be important, but it isn't the point of your story. Old Sam is.

If, on the other hand, your opening sentence is "Old Sam was the most unforgettable dog I ever met," your editor might not think you have the world's best knack for opening lines, but he will know what you plan to talk about up front, and be more inclined to read on. If that background information is really necessary, find another way to work it in.

Part of getting to the point is explaining to the editor, and the reader, why he or she should spend time reading what you have to say. Why are you writing this particular article? Why are you writing it now? The answer may lie in your credentials, your personal experience, or simply in your ability to express important ideas to the editor's readers.

Let's say that you want to write an article about a new virus in cats. Why should the reader hear about this from you? The answer could be that you're a veterinarian who has handled several cases of the virus and can enlighten cat owners about it; or you might be a cat owner who learned about this disease, and you want to share the information you've gathered. Or, as a writer with a "nose" for a good story, you might choose to interview both veterinarians and cat owners about the disease and its effects, providing an article that combines human appeal with expert information.

The approach you choose will depend upon your market and your audience, but you should make two things clear from the beginning: Why this topic is important, and why the editor should accept you as the best person to write about it. Then let your story tell itself.

Step 2: Get Organized.

While I was editor of a pet magazine, one of my associates told me of a trick she had learned to help her organize her thoughts while writing: "Think in subheads." Just about every magazine or newspaper story of any length is broken into smaller chunks, each set off with a subhead. Those subheads make the page look better visually, and lead the reader through an organized series of ideas.

If you look at your article carefully, you'll probably find that it breaks down into three or four major component ideas. Thinking of subheads for these ideas gives you a chance to organize your thoughts into the appropriate categories, almost like creating an outline for the article after it has been written. You may find during this process that you need to flesh out one of your ideas in greater detail, cut back on another, or add yet a third. Your subheads don't have to be cute or catchy; their primary purpose is to help you organize your material (and to demonstrate that organization to the editor).

Step 3: Get rid of the clutter.

 

When you break your article into subheads, you may find that you have some ideas that don't belong under any of the categories you've roughed out. This may mean one of two things: You need another subhead, or you don't need that material at all. The information might serve as a basis for another manuscript, but will only clutter this one.

It can be painful to look at a stack of notes and realize that, even though it took you hours to get that information, you can't use it all in your article. But part of your job is precisely that: Deciding what is most important about the information you've amassed, and presenting that--and only that--to your readers. If you leave it to an editor to pluck the gems from the clutter, he may simply pluck a rejection slip from the drawer instead.

So read through your work again. Once you've organized it, you'll find it easier to spot ideas that are only tangential to the main subject, or identify background material that is interesting but doesn't contribute a great deal to the basic idea. Try pulling some of this material out of the main text and presenting it as a sidebar.

Suppose, for example, that you are writing about cancer treatments at a particular clinic, and you've found some interesting information about another clinic or another method that seems promising. If that information doesn't belong in the main body of your piece, write it up as a complementary sidebar. If the editor likes your sidebar and has room for it, you may even get paid extra for it. But if not, you won't have jeopardized the success of your main article by cluttering it with extra information.

Step 4: Keep it "clean."

Whenever an editor receives an all-but-illegible manuscript, filled with typos, the first reaction is that the writer doesn't care enough about the magazine or its audience to present the best article he can. The editor will be prejudiced against such an article from the beginning, and the writer will have to work twice as hard to prove that the content of the article outweighs the sloppy presentation.

Unfair? Maybe. But if a writer doesn't check for the typos and grammatical errors--the easy stuff--an editor is bound to wonder whether that writer was any more careful where it counts. When a manuscript is littered with misspellings, what assurance does the editor have that the writer has checked facts, verified every phone number, and doubled-checked figures and the spellings of names?

Editors also get irritated by the idiosyncracies of computer printouts. While computers have come a long way, remember that if you are asked to submit an electronic copy of your article (particularly in text format), your editor may have to deal with weird characters that creep in where you've specified formatting commands (such as underlining or italics). Editors also don't care to deal with the weird spacing that results when you justify the right margin. Leave that sort of formatting to the magazine; when submitting your manuscript, do as little formatting as possible.

Be careful, also, of errors that creep in when you make corrections or changes. It's easy to miss duplicate sentences, or half-sentences, or bizarre formatting problems that result from careless corrections. Don't just hope the editor can figure out what you meant to do; do it right the first time.

Finally, editors like to know that you know they exist, and that you know what is going on with their publications. When an editor receives a manuscript addressed to his predecessor's predecessor (it's happened to me!), he can't help but wonder how recently the author has examined a copy of the magazine.

The penultimate sin, of course, is to leave out your self-addressed, stamped envelope. Make sure that you've put enough postage on your SASE; I've known writers to slap a single first-class stamp on a 9x12 manila envelope that would require additional postage to mail even if it were empty. (The ultimate sin, of course, is to allow your manuscript to arrive with postage due.)

So take another look at that manuscript you're about to put in the mail. Did you read it through with an editor's eyes--the eyes of someone who has never seen it before and doesn't know in advance what you're trying to say? Is your print clean and dark? Is there enough postage on both envelopes? If you've answered "yes" to all of these questions, congratulations! You've begun to think like an editor--and removed another barrier between you and success.

Copyright © 2001 Moira Allen
This article originally appeared in The Writer. 

 

About the Author

Moira Allen is the editor of Writing-World.com, and has written nearly 400 articles, serving as a columnist and regular contributor for such publications as The Writer, Entrepreneur, Writer's Digest, and Byline. An award-winning writer, Allen is the author of eight books, including Starting Your Career as a Freelance Writer, The Writer's Guide to Queries, Pitches and Proposals, and Writing to Win: The Colossal Guide to Writing Contests. In addition to Writing-World.com, Allen hosts VictorianVoices.net, a growing archive of articles from Victorian periodicals, and The Pet Loss Support Page, a resource for grieving pet owners. She lives in Maryland with her husband and the obligatory writer's cat.

Moira Allen Books at Amazon