Unit three

Planning

Unit contents

Outlining with Microsoft Word

Successful writers always make some kind of outline before writing a long piece of work. This way, it is easier to organize your thoughts, plan necessary research and of course, present your ideas in a coherent and logical way.

Why make an outline?

If you don't like free-writing, you may prefer the more orderly method of using an outline to organize you ideas for an essay or report. Some teachers may ask to see an outline of your ideas before allowing you to proceed to writing a first draft. Luckily, these days, it's easy to put an outline together on your computer. Word has a built-in Outline View which is very simple to use.

Microsoft Word Outline View

• To use Outline View, open a new Word Document and select View and then Outline as shown here:

• Here is an example of part of an outline of a student essay. Notice that the screen looks like the usual Word display, except for the bottom menu bar, shown here inside the red outline:

In this example, there are three Heading Levels (which is probably as many levels as you would want to have in a first-year essay). Heading levels are shown in two ways: by the indentation of the text and the size of the font (letters). The highest levels are indented furthest to the left and are in the largest font size. Here we've indicated the heading levels in parentheses next to the first three lines. These correspond to the essay title, paragraph headings and paragraph topic sentences respectively.

• You can set the Heading Level of a line either before or after you type it.
• To set Heading Levels for a line of text, put your cursor on the line and then click on either Promote (left pointing arrow) or Demote (right pointing arrow) at the far left of the Outline Power Bar, shown below. Clicking on these arrows will move the text up or down one Heading Level.

• Alternatively, you can use the pull down Heading menu

You can use Outline View to create a plan of your essay in point form. The headings that you create do not necessarily have to be headings in the final version of your essay. They can just be the points that you intend to write about.

You can print out an outine created in Outline View by clicking on the Printer icon on the Microsoft Word toolbar (make sure your computer is connected to a printer first!). Or you can start writing a draft without printing. The next unit of the Turbocharger will show you how to turn an outline into a draft.

Note: You can easily use an Outline from Word as a PowerPoint Slide Presentation by simply using the "insert slides from outline" command in PowerPoint - Yet another good reason to use this function!