Unsolicited Advice: Crafting Top-tier Articles with Outlines

[Person_Random 4,991]

Unsolicited Advice: Crafting Top-tier Articles with Outlines

 

Hey all! I haven’t been writing for a while, but rest assured - I still know how to write (hopefully). Just recently, I was hovering around the forum and went to an idea rabbit hole of giving unsolicited advice, and from there, the idea of writing about outlines was born.

 

As a young and inexperienced writer, I once wrote an editorial claiming that the main points to gain popularity as a writer were title, format, and images. Poor past me - I had it all backwards. While those points boost article appearance and make it more reader friendly, it’s not the main reason an article would gain traction. The true reason some works of writing rose to the top and not others was all in the way it was created and the flow. Leaps of logic and confusing side tangents confuse readers; clear points of reasoning and logical, smooth flow makes something a breeze to read. And the fastest and easiest way to write a piece to check all of these boxes is with none other than a simple outline. 
 

The Birth of an Outline Enjoyer

Here’s some backstory: I definitely wasn’t and still am not the best writer, but I’ve built up some respectable work over time. 

My beginnings were quite terrible - I remember one of the first essays I wrote as a grade schooler earned me a C. Showing the paper to my parents was truly an embarrassment. My dad screamed at me for my poor writing and then proceeded to tear apart my work. As a young and restless student, I was quite bad at writing - I had a short attention span and jumped from idea to idea, and so the essay was truly incomprehensible and unacceptable.

That’s when I was taught the idea of main ideas and a thesis - a sentence summarizing the purpose of the work. I was confused at the time, but I just followed along out of fear, writing and re-writing until it passed my dad’s inspections and earned me a solid A-, barely passable in the eyes of parents who expected straight As. And as expected, my parents weren’t satisfied - I created one good paper, but it was evident that I continued to struggle as a writer. That’s when writing class came in and I was introduced to an outline.

Definition 1.1: Outline

A bulleted list of ideas used for your paper, I think.

Being introduced to a concept to construct work and the idea of forcing yourself to write outlines and continuous drafts definitely helped shape my work up from “completely unacceptable” to “somewhat passable, just because you write too much and no one wants to read that”, but at that point, I just didn’t understand what an outline was for. I’d write an outline and proceed to write a paper without even thinking of the outline I had written moments ago, going back to my old ways.

This continued on for years - I just struggled as a writer, barely earning passing marks in papers (side note: many of my classes often curved their paper grades up to mid/low 80 marks as long as you wrote for the correct prompt, hence why an 85 is ‘barely passing’ instead of ‘decent work’) and writing to little success as an AWS writer, taking months to craft something somewhat usable. And then it hit me.

In my last year of formal high school education, I got a bad case of Tanki-influenced senioritis - I just didn’t have the motivation to do classwork since I was so hyper-focused on improving things in my Tanki helper position. It didn’t help that I had an English teacher who made us write tons of papers and writing prompts. As an indifferent student, I often begged for extensions and speedran papers in the mere hours before deadlines, writing up a bare-bones outline and filling it out with fluff words to make the word count.
Surprisingly, instead of being greeted with poor grades, my teachers loved my work, which was a pleasant change for once. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was just my classmates’ senioritis dragging them down to the position of middle school writers or if I had actually improved, but as I began to write some more papers and prompts, I realized while the grade curve certainly was easier, my writing had also become much more coherent and organized - I could write much more complex and work far better and faster than I did back in my early AWS days (though my word choice and writing execution are still awful, but that’s not something I can easily solve).

Now, I’ve reached a point where outlining and quickly writing something up is second nature, and it’s just one simple process. Here’s how it all works.
 

Outlining: An Art and an Algorithm

I’m completely kidding about the art part - fortunately, outlining is analytical and algorithmic; I just wanted to put that in since all my professors keep calling all the math we do “an art”. In fact, you can think of outlining as a computer algorithm; something like this:

Well, now that I threw these lines of code at you, it’s time to explain what they mean. The first thing is turning your paper idea into an outline, or what I defined as “write_outline”. It’s a pretty simple idea that fits nicely into a recursive algorithm:

• Step 1: List out main points - things like an introduction, background story, big ideas, comparisons, and conclusions, to name a few. These will serve as the main “paragraphs” or “sections” of your work.
• Step 2: Within each main point, there will probably be additional points you want to cover. Under each of these main points, add some more bullet points covering your additional topics.
• Step 3: This continues again - within your additional points, you can scour out more points, and so on. Keep outlining additional points as needed, indenting and writing little fragments and ideas. It’s a good point to stop indenting and bullet pointing when your bullet point indentation reaches more than half the page you get into too much detail or if your bullet points start looking like paragraphs and sentences rather than short ideas.

Likewise, writing out your paper from an outline is also a recursive algorithm - you reverse the process of creating bullet points from a topic and turn them into full sentences. Whereas you started with the big ideas from a topic, you now start with the small details and write your way up:

• Step 1: Go through your smallest subpoints and construct them into coherent sentences.
• Step 2: Go back to the next point that surrounds the subpoint and join the subpoints into one sentence.
• Step 3: Again, we repeat - creating coherent bits from subpoints until we have a full body paragraph or large topic, and before you know it, the paper has written itself.

This algorithmic approach allows me to really buckle down when I lack the ability to write something or am in a time crunch - it simplifies writing into just following short steps by building an outline, then unraveling it and adding fluff to create your work. By implementing this technique, the changes were like night and day - whereas before, it took long hours (days, even months) of toiling away to write something coherent, it was now effortless. In fact, the other day, I crafted up a short 5-paragraph essay in just a few minutes. The time saved leaves plenty of space to spruce things up and format it to your heart’s desire.
 

Hypocrite PR, what about format?

And yes, while outline creates solid structure and flow, you can’t forget about format. Format first is still backwards - it’s like believing that fancy footwear is the main way of making you faster versus training - but it’s also a factor to consider.

A nice way to think of outlines and format is like function and form. Outlines provide the main function of the article, making your work readable and actually usable instead of a page of fluff that no one will ever be able to decipher. On the other hand, format is the form, something that shapes the article into something presentable and easily digestible. With that in mind, let’s revisit my three main claims of title, genre, and images with the outline model in mind.

• Title: A nice title is like a hook for your work and definitely something that needs to be at least usable and marketable. By defining your main points, a title is easy to generate.
• Genre: I don’t agree with my old points anymore; a few tips and tricks for genre here and there work, but all in all, it comes down to outlining and planning things. With that in mind, here are some sample structures to constructing hot guides, reviews, and interviews.
• Images/Media: Still relevant, if not more so. Images can complement your work and provide fast and insightful ways to consume information. Now, with an outline, you can add bullet points with a note to insert images and pinpoint the best places to add these bits of information to best fit your work. Having this planned ahead also reduces the unfortunate rookie PR mistake of adding images after every other paragraph.

And that’s a wrap! I’m aware that I might’ve wasted your time gushing about outlines, something you already learned in grade school and implemented in your daily life. I’m just slow, alright? *sobs unimportantly* Or maybe I’ve also wasted your time by telling you about outlines as you don’t care in the slightest about writing. *sobs importantly*

Anyways, regardless of your enjoyment or perceived usefulness out of your article, I hope you found something interesting and can apply it to your life. Thanks for reading, start writing (more) outlines, and catch you later! (if I hop on the forum ever again)

Edited June 17, 2022 by Person_Random
anger i messed up i pressed ctrl enter instead of shift enter

[Venerable 2,967]

All I got to know is that you're most definitely (an advanced) bot. 

 

Seriously though, using the concepts of programming to write better is just - amazing. It's something I should be able to do, but my "computational quotient" (if that's a thing lol) is not high enough. I just can't think like a programmer when a deadline is staring into my face. I enjoy programming, but today's fast-paced world doesn't allow people like me to learn programming languages without ∞^∞ stress. 

P.S. Is that code written in Python?

[Person_Random 4,991]

On 6/18/2022 at 1:14 AM, Venerable said:

All I got to know is that you're most definitely (an advanced) bot. 

 

Seriously though, using the concepts of programming to write better is just - amazing. It's something I should be able to do, but my "computational quotient" (if that's a thing lol) is not high enough. I just can't think like a programmer when a deadline is staring into my face. I enjoy programming, but today's fast-paced world doesn't allow people like me to learn programming languages without ∞^∞ stress. 

P.S. Is that code written in Python?

Thanks so much! I learned from none other than the best: @Flexoo, who perfected this art far earlier than I did. 

As for the algorithm, it's a (tree) recursive algorithm in Python. Recursion is a concept that is usually introduced with introductory programming courses but is quite hard to grasp the first time (as experienced in the intro programming course - many, including me, still treat this as a class that teaches a language instead of concepts). The idea behind a recursive algorithm like this is the following:

• Perform an action on the current level. (i.e. writing out bullet points to describe a topic in mind)
• Run the algorithm on the sub-structure. (i.e. analyzing each bullet as if it were a topic, repeating the above step)
• Stop the algorithm given a certain condition, or base case. (i.e. when a topic's description is sufficiently descriptive)

That's probably enough as a high-level description, and it just barely scratches the surface of the world of programming. If you want to learn more and begin to think more like a programmer, I would highly recommend taking a look at the course I took this year; you can find the current website here (append sp22 as a subdomain if you want to see the previous semester's slides).

Edited June 19, 2022 by Person_Random
woops i forgot it's 2022

[Incorp 2,084]

Heh heh, i didnt expect to see you writing anymore here, so im really delighted by this :3

[Tokamak 1,021]

Amazing work. A talented bad writer as myself and in search for easy way to improve, will steal with pride this method.

thank you sir.

Do you feed your python with dead or live mice? 

[Person_Random 4,991]

6 hours ago, Tokamak said:

Amazing work. A talented bad writer as myself and in search for easy way to improve, will steal with pride this method.

thank you sir.

Do you feed your python with dead or live mice? 

You're welcome! I use laziness as inspiration.

I occasionally feed my python wood chips from the table flips it incurs. 

[mjmj5558 2,346]

I'm wondering why haven't i found this before... Amazing work!