BSO: The Basic Scratch Outline

None of the essays or research papers you will have to write in college will have fewer than two or more than six main points. In fact, almost all of them will have only three or four main points.

You see, anything without at least two main points would not be substantive enough to write an essay about--not even a short essay for an in-class exam. And anything with more than six main points would be too broad for even a 20- to 30-page research paper.

Since most of the essays you will write in college are likely to range between 600 and 3000 words (about two to ten typed pages), you can safely assume that most will require three or four main points of development.

Now, think about the formal outlines you were taught to write in your high school and middle school English classes. You know the type:

Remember all the rules? First you had to learn the proper order for numerals and letters: Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, lower case letters, Roman numerals in parentheses, capital letters in parentheses, Arabic numerals in parentheses, lower case letters in parentheses, etc.

Then you had to learn to make the parts of your outline precisely parallel. If it was a sentence outline, each part had to be written as a complete sentence. If it was a phrase outline, each part had to be written as a phrase, and all of the phrases had to be in parallel form--all infinitive phrases, or all gerund phrases, or all noun phrases.

You couldn't have an "A" without a "B" or a "1" without a "2". Some teachers even insisted that every main point had to have exactly the same number of subpoints as every other main point, and every subpoint had to have the same number of sub-subpoints as every other subpoint.

My goodness! Imagine all the time and intellectual energy that has been wasted on this elaborate form of desk-clearing! That's all it is, you know--desk-clearing. It's a way to waste time, to spin your wheels without making any progress toward actually writing your essay.

Besides, I'll bet many of you did the exact same thing I did: you went ahead and wrote your essay first, and then wrote your outline from the essay, rather than vice versa, as it was supposed to be.

So does that mean I think you should just skip outlining altogether? Actually, no. I think outlining is an important part of writing. In fact, a lot of writers are bound to get lost or sidetracked if they don't outline their essays before they begin to write.

Think about what you do naturally, automatically, when you have to write a short essay during an in-class exam. You look at the question, and then in the margins of the test, or on some bit of scratch paper, you quickly jot down the two or three or four main points you want to cover in your answer. Often you will jot them down in more or less logical order, but even if you don't, it usually takes only a minute to rearrange them.

Well, that's what I call a Basic Scratch Outline (BSO). If you have a reasonable understanding of a subject (which you'd better, if you are trying to write an essay or an exam on it!), then you should be able to quickly identify the main points of that subject and their logical arrangement. It should not take more than a couple of minutes to come up with a BSO on any assigned topic, provided of course that you have acquired that reasonable understanding of the topic.

Remember that your writing assignments will almost always have three or four main points, so your typical BSO should look this:

Even long research papers, though, may have only, say, four main points. The real difference is likely to be in the number of subpoints that are covered under each main point.

For short essays of about 1200 words or less, the simple 1-4 list of main points may be all the outlining you need to do, especially if you are quite knowledgeable about your subject. But suppose it's not? Suppose you need more outlining to be sure that you stay on track, or because the developmental details are so numerous and complicated that you are afraid you might leave something out?

That doesn't mean that your outline has to get all fancy. The BSO is still good enough. Just take it down a level or two. Pretend that each main point is a separate topic, and then identify the two or three or four main subpoints of that topic. Your two-level BSO would look something like this:

For longer or more complex essays (even that 25-page research paper), you can take the outline down as many levels as necessary to keep your material under your complete control. For example, a four-level BSO might look like this:

I have devised another outlining technique, which I call the Expanded Scratch Outline (ESO). I will explain that technique in another article. But although some of my students find the ESO helpful, I have never used it myself. The BSO has always been robust enough to handle any writing project that I have felt the need to outline.

Once I worked with a geography professor who was having trouble completing his dissertation by his deadline, though he had been struggling with it for well over a year. He had written 500 pages detailing two years' worth of field research in the Sahel region of Niger. But his final draft was not supposed to exceed 300 pages, and he could find no way to reduce 500 pages of material to 300 pages--so he hired me to help.

Each main point had several subpoints, of course, and each subpoint had several sub-subpoints, down through several levels of specificity.

Our BSO of his dissertation went down to six levels, and it was nine pages long! But once we had each main point in its proper order, we were able to break down each point or subpoint (or sub-subpoint) into a handful of sub-subpoints, without worrying about the other ones before we got to them or after we had finished with them.

Once we got each of the five main points broken down to its deepest level of specificity, we could simply put those pages of the outline aside and then start breaking down the next point into its successive subpoints and sub-subpoints.

When we were done, we had a complete (and very detailed) outline for the entire 300-page dissertation, and all he had to do was pick any section, or any part of any section, and write up the relevant data for that subpoint. As long as each part was properly labeled, so he knew where in the outline it would go when finished, he could work on any part that he felt like working on--at any time, in any order.

And the precise, detailed outline gave us a quick reference point, so it was easy to see what data could be excised as irrelevant or redundant. (That's how we cut the monster down from 500 to 300 pages.)

The outline only took me about an hour to complete, once I had carefully gone over his original draft. And with outline in hand, the dissertation itself took only two months to work into its final form.

The Basic Scratch Outline. Whether you are writing a one-page essay for an in-class exam, a 25-page research paper, or a 300-page treatise, you probably won't need any other outlining tool.

But if you want another one, keep watching for my next article, "ESO: The Expanded Scratch Outline." It should be available within the next couple of weeks.