Unit 3 WK 3 All About Outlining

 

Outlines are like the inner steel structures of buildings. 

Those inner steel structures are the "skeletons" of buildings that are later covered with glass and wood and more to make something usable. Outlines are just like that. They are the "skeletons" of an essay or a text, and offer a brief highlight of the most important material in a text.

When you sketch a brief outline of a text, you may be pulling your annotations from the margins of the text, and you may be pulling out some of the key quotes you've underlined, and some of the terms and vocabulary you've circled. 

When you move these notes into a formal outline structure, you're giving the notes an organizational structure similar to the movement of the text you're reading.

The sample in your A Writer's Reference text in Section A1-a and A1-b is a good example of the sketched outline moving into a formal outline.

A formal outline serves many functions in a writing classroom. 

1. Formal Outlines can serve as abbreviated "maps" of a text you've read. You can use these to study the key points of a text you may have to remember.
2. Formal Outlines can be made prior to the start of writing an essay. You may have brainstormed some ideas and then moved those ideas into a formal outline from which you'll develop full sentences and paragraphs.

In this way, a formal outline is both a reading and a writing tool. (For information on the formal outline as a writing tool, reference C1-d in A Writer's Reference.)

Formal outlines have a particular structure to follow. You can review your A Writer's Reference. At the end of this unit, you'll be asked to compose a formal outline of a text you've annotated for your English 1A class. Be sure to follow the strict format guidelines.

The next two pages offer an overview of outlines courtesy of the Purdue Online Writing Lab. You may have to click an extra link inside the page to get to the content, so please read carefully. Also, it will take you out of our CANVAS LMS, so if you prefer, you can open an additional web browsing tab and paste in the links below.

The direct links for the next two pages are:

Four Main Components of Effective Outlines:http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/544/1/ Links to an external site.

Types of Outlines and Examples: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/544/03/ Links to an external site.