College Admission Essays: Outlining - The Logical Choice

Outlining: The Logical Choice

When I say outline, I know that all sorts of threatening numerals and letters flit through your mind: IV, IX, XVIII, A, 2, a, b, c. . . . I also imagine that you immediately start worrying about how many spaces to indent everything. On behalf of English teachers everywhere, I apologize for freaking you out about the rules of formal outlines. I also want to tell you that a famous New York phrase is the best solution to this outline nightmare: Fuhgeddaboutit. (For non-Law and Order fans, that’s New Yorkese for Forget about it.) You don’t have to hand this outline to an Authoritu Figure; no one will see the outline but you. So the formal outline systems, useful as they are for some types of papers, are not essential here.

But the outline itself is essential. Before you begin the rough draft, you must decide what you want to say and the order in which you want to say it. That’s the essence of an outline — not the numbers, letters, and fancy margins. Granted, a written outline is not crucial to the success of the finished essay. Because the essay is a rather short piece of writing, you may be able to keep an outline in your mind, just as some cooks are able to throw in a pinch of this and a cup of that without consulting a printed recipe. Nevertheless, most people find that a cookbook leads to less indigestion and a written outline leads to fewer writing headaches.

Furthermore, the whole indentation mania does have a point. In classic outline structure, everything of equal importance is indented the same number of spaces from the left-hand margin. The indentation actually creates a visual display of the logic of your essay. You shouldn’t obsess over the number of spaces or the numbering system, but you should think of your outline as a set of categories. As you create an outline, indent every time you divide a category into smaller subdivisions. When you’re done, you should be able to see which categories carry the same weight, and which ideas are subordinate to others — in short, how the whole thing is organized.

Check out Figure A, a humorous (and totally untrue) outline of the college admissions process. Notice that the three largest categories (extraction, fabrication, submission) are not indented at all. These three categories are equal in importance. The “fabrication” category is divided into four equal parts: letters of recommendation, test scores, school grades, and essay. These four headings on the outline are indented equally (five spaces from the left-hand margin, for those of you who like details). The smaller categories are themselves subdivided. The “essay” category, for example, is divided into four sub-categories: intensive psychoanalysis, midnight oil burning, soul baring, and total desperation. (Okay, maybe some truth crept into this outline!)

Figure A: A Sample Outline