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An outline is a hierarchical way to display related items of text to graphically depict their relationships.

They are often used by students for research papers. Outlines provide a summary showing the logical flow of a paper. They are useful because they:

(1) help the writer organize their thoughts before getting bogged down in word choice and sentence structure;

(2) show which ideas need illustration or elaboration; and

(3) help the writer decide on an organizational technique for the report, whether it be logical, chronological, or categorical in nature.

Contents 1 Outlining reports 2 Outlining stories 2.1 Location outlines 2.2 Plot outlines 3 See also 4 References

Textbooks generally recommend that, before constructing an outline, a writer should research the topic and take notes--preferably on index cards--as they go. The notes need not be more than a summary of what the author thinks is important. Each note card normally has a heading (called a slug) in the upper-left hand corner. Each slug later becomes a heading or subheading in the outline. The writer can later lay their cards on a table and group those that belong together. This creates a rough division of the topic. The writer may then put the cards in an order that approximates a final outline.

Outline is also a name for a prose telling of a story to be turned into a screenplay. Sometimes called a one page (one page synopsis, about 1 - 3 pages). It is generally longer and more detailed than a standard synopsis (1 - 2 paragraphs), but shorter and less detailed than a treatment or a step outline. There are different ways to do these outlines and they vary in length.

Some use a location outline which is very similar to scene cards (index cards) but only has location headings followed by short clear sentences of what goes on in each location.

In comics, an outline--often pluralised as outlines--refers to a stage in the development where the story has been broken down very loosely in a style similar to storyboarding in film development.

The pencils will be very loose (i.e., the sketch rough), the main aim being to layout the flow of panels across a page, ensure the story successfully builds suspense and to work out points of view, camera angles and character positions within panels. This can also be referred to as a plot outline or a layout.

• Outliner
• Folding editor
• Personal information manager

Mary Ellen Guffey, "Organizing and Writing Business Messages," Business Communication: Process and Product, p. 160-161.

"Numbers: Lists and Outlines," Manual for Writers and Editors (Merriam-Webster, Incorporated: 1998), p. 103.

White, Basil (1996) Developing Products and Their Rhetoric from a Single Hierarchical Model, 1996 Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Society for Technical Communication, 43, 223-224. [1]

OWL: Online Writing Lab, Purdue University

"report writing," Britannica Student Encyclopedia, Encyclopædia Britannica Online (Accessed January 5, 2006)

William E. Coles, Jr. "Outline," World Book Online (Accessed January 5, 2006)