The worst essays I face when it comes time to grade are those that are disorganized, rambling, and incoherent. If your students, like mine, struggle to write well-structured, focused papers, it’s time to go old-school with an outlining strategy.
The humble outline is a powerful prewriting technique that can revolutionize the quality and clarity of your students’ writing. By teaching them to outline before drafting an essay, you’ll equip them with essential planning and organization skills for crafting clear, coherent, and well-developed arguments. I can’t understand why we moved so far away from outlining in the past few decades because it is just THAT powerful. Kids love it too!
The Benefits of Outlining for High Schoolers
Outlining shouldn’t be a dusty relic from the past—it’s an incredibly valuable tool for today’s student writers. Here are some key advantages to incorporating outlining into your essay writing units:
- Logical Organization: Outlines provide a blueprint that helps students logically sequence their ideas and arguments. No more jumping around or losing their train of thought.
- Focused Writing: The outline planning process forces students to hone their thesis and key supporting points before drafting. This prevents rambling and keeps the writing focused.
- Coherent Flow: With an outline to guide them, students can smoothly transition between thoughts and subtopics, improving overall coherence. Their transitions will make more sense, too!
- Time Management: Outlining first streamlines the drafting stage, allowing students to write more efficiently once they’ve mapped out the essay.
Emphasize these benefits to your kids before, during, and after you teach them to outline!!
Implementing Outlining in the Classroom
Getting students on board with outlining from the start sets them up for long-term writing success. An outlining mini-lesson can easily fit into your curriculum:
- Allocate 20 minutes to model sequential outlining techniques, like Roman numerals to organize topics and sub-points.
- Share an essay example or two that illustrates logical organization and effective planning strategies, and then show them the outline that preceded it!
- Give a brief overview of outline elements: thesis, main ideas, supporting details, etc.
WANT AN OUTLINE “HOW TO” HANDOUT? THIS ONE-PAGER EXPLAINS IT ALL!
After teaching & modeling, have students practice by crafting their own outlines for an upcoming essay assignment, either in class over 1-2 periods or as homework. As they grow more adept at outlining, have them follow the process for every major writing piece.
With outlining as the first step, even struggling writers gain a roadmap for developing focused, well-reasoned essays from start to finish. You’ll be amazed at the coherent, nuanced compositions your high schoolers are able to produce! And no more grading-time frustration! That essay that took you 6 times as long to grade as the others because it was a jumbled, unfocused mess? You won’t be getting that anymore!
Introduce outlining to your high schoolers NOW to build better writers for life. Don’t let another subpar essay cross your desk—try outlining instead!
Pro tip: You can also skim their outlines and provide feedback or conference with them about their outlines BEFORE they start drafting. This is another powerful tool that’ll help ensure you get the essays you want out of your students, and they don’t wander off way down the wrong path before it’s too late!!
Sample Student Outline
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