Article Outline Builder

Most advice about outlining is delivered as a moral: plan first, write second, and virtue will be rewarded. The research is more interesting than the sermon. It says outlining helps, that it helps in a particular way, and that some good writers get to the same place by another road.

What the studies found, and what they did not

The cleanest early result comes from Ronald Kellogg’s experiments with college students in the 1980s. Students who outlined before drafting produced writing that judges rated higher. What outlining did not do was make them faster: quality rose, efficiency did not. A rough first draft, the other strategy he tested, changed neither. His survey of faculty pointed the same way, with outlining linked to productivity and rough drafting not.

Later classroom work agrees. A Dutch study gave 34 tenth-grade students two similar argumentative tasks, one with an outlining tool and one without. The outlined texts were better, and the students reported less mental effort while writing them. That second finding is the useful one. An outline does not add ideas. It moves the job of ordering them out of the moment when you are also choosing words, so each job gets your whole attention.

Large surveys tell a similar story from the other side. When the drafts of 1,089 students sitting a psychology examination were analysed, only a limited number had used an organised drafting strategy, and that strategy went with the highest scores. A study of 200 undergraduates writing academic English as a second language found that the high scorers were the ones who used strategies such as outlining, drafting and proofreading.

So far, so tidy. But a questionnaire study of 715 undergraduates sorted them into four habits: minimal drafting, outline and develop, detailed planning, and think then do. The better essays came from the detailed planners and from the people who thought it through and then simply wrote. Planning mattered. Putting the plan on paper as a formal outline was one way to plan, not the only one.

That is the honest summary. The evidence favours thinking about structure before drafting. It is mostly from students, mostly on short set tasks, and it measures judged quality, not whether readers learned anything. It does not show that a writer who plans well in their head must change.

Where the common shapes came from

Writers rarely invent a structure. They borrow one, and the borrowed ones have histories that explain what they are good at.

The inverted pyramid puts the most important and substantial facts at the top and lets the rest follow in falling order of importance. It is taught to journalism students and used across English-language news. Its origin is disputed. Many accounts credit the telegraph, which was costly and unreliable enough to reward getting the essentials through first, while studies of nineteenth-century newspapers suggest the form spread decades after the telegraph did. Whatever its cause, its virtue is plain: a reader can stop at any paragraph and still leave with the main thing.

The research paper took the opposite path, from freedom to rule. Scientific articles began in the seventeenth century as letters and plain descriptions. The form with an introduction, methods, results and discussion appeared in leading medical journals in the 1940s, became the majority pattern only in the 1970s, when it passed 80 percent, and was the sole pattern for original papers in the 1980s. It was recommended long before it was adopted.

Even that form is not read the way it is written. In a recent survey of science and health researchers, 98.6 percent said they read the abstract first, and most did not go through a paper in its printed order. They went to the sections they thought important or found easy. A structure, in other words, is a set of labelled doors as much as a path.

The other familiar shapes, the how-to with numbered steps, the comparison, the problem and its solution, the list, have no single inventor. They are conventions, and a convention is a promise to the reader about what comes next. Pick one on purpose.

Headings are how many readers move

For someone looking at a page, headings are a visual convenience. For someone using a screen reader they are the map. Heading markup lets assistive technology announce a heading with its level, and lets a reader jump from one heading to the next to find what they came for. That only works when the headings are real headings, marked up as such and nested by rank.

Some of this is requirement and some is advice, and the difference is worth keeping straight. The accessibility guidelines require that where headings exist, they describe the topic or purpose of what follows; that is a level AA criterion. Providing section headings wherever content is organised into sections is asked for at the stricter level AAA, because it cannot be applied to every kind of text. The documented techniques for marking up headings are examples of how to comply, not rules in themselves.

Skipping a rank, putting a level four heading straight under a level two, is discouraged by the W3C’s own tutorial as confusing and to be avoided where possible. It is not a failure of the guidelines. The same tutorial notes that jumping back up, from a level four to a new level two, is fine, since that simply closes a subsection.

Length is softer still. The plain-language guidance of the United States government asks only that headings be shorter than the content that follows and not overwhelm it, and recommends question headings when you know what readers will ask. The British government’s publishing guidance sets a figure for page titles: 65 characters or less including spaces, because search results cut longer titles off and they are harder to understand. Treat that number as one publisher’s guideline, not a law.

Budgeting words

A heading is a claim on the reader’s time, and a word count turns that claim into a number. Adults reading English non-fiction silently average 238 words a minute, according to a review of 190 studies, with most people between 175 and 300. An article of 1,200 words therefore asks for 5 min 03 s from the average reader. Seeing that figure beside the outline changes decisions. A section that would cost the reader a minute and a half had better earn it.

Dividing a total among sections sounds trivial and is not, because shares rarely come out as whole words. Rounding each one separately can leave the parts a word or two off the total. The fix is old and comes from elections, where seats must be whole. In the method Germany’s Federal Returning Officer describes under the names Hare and Niemeyer, each party’s exact share is split into its whole part and its remainder; the whole parts are handed out, and the leftover seats go to the largest remainders in order.

Here is a case to try. Start an empty outline with a target of 1,000 words, add seven sections and ask for equal shares. One seventh of 1,000 is 142 and six sevenths. Every section gets 142, which uses 994 words. Six words are left and all seven remainders are equal, so the first six sections get one more: six budgets of 143 and one of 142, adding up to 1,000 exactly. With a target of 1,200 and shares of three, two and one, the result is 600, 400 and 200 with nothing left over.

A budget is not a quota. Its use is in the comparison: when the draft is written, lay it over the outline and see which sections ran long. A section at twice its budget is telling you something. Either it is two sections, or the plan undervalued it.

When to drop the plan

An outline is a guess made before you knew what you thought. The same studies that favour planning describe good writers who plan in other ways, and nothing in them says that the first plan should survive contact with the draft. If the argument turns out to live in what was meant as a passing point, move it up and rebuild around it.

There are also things no outline can do. It cannot tell you whether a claim is true, whether a source is sound, or whether the piece is worth writing. It checks order and proportion. A perfectly nested, evenly budgeted outline of a dull idea produces a well-organised dull article.

What it does offer is cheap revision. Moving a heading costs a second; moving the six paragraphs under it costs an afternoon and some pride. Do the moving while it is still cheap, then write, and keep the outline open beside the draft as a record of what you promised the reader.