I Should Start with an Outline, Right?

It is that time of year again. August has drawn to a close and we are now into September. The shops have their school stationary front and centre – pens of all kinds, piles of printer paper, shiny new notebooks in all manner of designs, just waiting for your brilliant ideas. Ah, yes – the start of the academic year. 

If you’re an MA student or a doctoral candidate, these golden days on the cusp of autumn may find you embarking on your dissertation, which typically starts with your literature review. What’s out there on your topic? What do we already know, or think we know? What is the lay of the land in your subject? As the autumn sunshine streams through your window, you’ll be digging into a stack of research articles and filling up one of your shiny new notebooks or its electronic equivalent. 

So what do you do with all this material you are collecting – all the findings, all the quotes, all the conclusions, and all the thoughts you have about these things? How do you turn that into your literature review chapter? An outline!, you say to yourself in triumph. That’s how I’ll start. I’ll make an outline. And you turn to an inviting new page in your notebook. 

So that’s how you should start, right? With an outline? Well, hang on a minute there. I have been reading another fantastic book, David Allen’s Getting Things Done (Viking Penguin, 2001). While this is mostly geared towards defining and organising your flow of tasks to maximise productivity at work, an insight he shares applies here: if you haven’t actually written anything yet, what will you outline? 

When I work with people on drafts, they often ask Will an outline be okay? And my answer is generally something along the lines of Well, outlines can be very useful, but I don’t suggest it as a starting point. Here are 3 of the main reasons why. 

• Outlines may make you feel like you are getting something done, but this can lead to a false sense of productivity. You might wind up listing topics you have read in outline format and if you then use that outline to write your chapter, you’ll end up with a description of what you’ve read.

• Outlines may be a satisfying way to impose some order on your unruly collection of notes, but if you haven’t come to grips with what your argument is, the order you have come up with won’t be useful. An outline should reflect the structure of your argument. That is, your first point should be your research question, and every other point and sub-point should be your evidence, culled and curated from your reading notes, for why it should be asked. If you haven’t done that thinking yet, outlining is the equivalent of running in place – lots of energy spent without getting anywhere.

• Outlining can be a very tempting displacement activity. Coming up with your argument is hard – we all face that when we write our literature review. It is just intrinsically hard. Producing an outline can be a way fool ourselves into thinking we are going forward when in reality we are just avoiding the hard bit of grappling with what our argument is. 

So what to do, especially if you are required to produce an outline? I return to David Allen: do some drafting first. Turn your notes into a set of cards, with one single sentence or idea per card. Why does your research question need to be answered? When you have 3 main points backed up by evidence from your reading notes that answer that question, you are ready to start outlining. 

Did you find this blog useful? Would more detail and guidance be helpful? I am now an independent writing and language consultant, and founder of Writing Works Consulting (watch this space for more announcements!) I offer writing workshops and specialise in workshops on writing dissertation literature reviews. 

If you are UK-based and organising research development training for MA or doctoral students and like the content of this blog, visit me on Linked In (www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290) and drop me a message to discuss a workshop that is right for you. 

And if you found this post helpful, please share it with your networks.

Susan Mandala, PhD

Independent Writing and Language Consultant

Founder, Writing Works Consulting