Chapter 17 An outline before you begin writing
Before you begin to write sentences and paragraphs, you need to plan. The reason for this is that it is very easy to get lost when you are writing. Scientific writing, what you will have in your thesis, is necessarily concise and technical relying on arguments and citations - all things that we will cover in this second part of the book. In your attempts to include all of these aspects in your writing, it is very easy to get lost and forget what it was that you were aiming to convey to the reader. The best way that you can ensure that you are going to meet your aims is to write your plan down in the form of an outline.
An outline will contain all of the ideas that you have to include in the written text. You should already have papers that you have read that you want to cite, a hypothesis or question that you want to test, and variables that you want to test. You can start by getting all of these ideas down into a document - as a mindmap on paper or as a computer file - remembering to include the aim of why it is that you are including this information in your writing.
Next, you will need to plan the order of your text. Your goal is to write in order to clearly communicate to the reader. I suggest that you begin to plan out your formula as a bullet-point outline (Figure 17.1). Start by writing a general sentence for the subject of each paragraph. Then use sub-points to plan each sentence within the paragraph. Lastly, annotate these with citations that you want to use. Personally, I’d prefer to see the bare outline, and then a fleshed outline before you start the writing proper. This allows advisor and student to get on the same page to be sure that what is planned is thought out.
FIGURE 17.1: Example of an outline draft of the introduction. In this outline taken from Measey et al. (2020), paragraphs are paragraphs are indicated by the solid dots, and points to make inside the paragraphs by hollow dots. Each paragraph has an argument sketched out within it.
In the above example, you may not know what EICAT and SEICAT are (they are scoring systems used for environmental - EICAT - or socio-economic - SEICAT - impacts of alien species), but I would hope that you can follow the broad argument of the introduction explaining why the study should be done.
17.1 Modifying your outline
Writing is a dynamic process, and things can change quite suddenly. You can find a new paper that you hadn’t read before which changes your introduction or discussion completely. You can hand your text to someone else to read and they can point out a fundamental flaw in your logic. All of these things and more might mean that you need to modify your outline. That’s ok. It’s normal. But you should go back to your outline and make the changes there before you carry on with your writing.
If you modify your text but don’t change your outline, it will become too easy to get lost and forget your aims. The aims can change, but keeping a record of the the new aims is essential otherwise you will have nothing to check your thesis chapter with once it is finished. Moreover, you may not be able to remember why you changed the outline or even what the aim was for your text. When you modify your outline, make sure that it still makes sense in the context of the entire chapter, and that you are not about to lose a crucial component of the thesis.
17.2 Next flesh out the outline with citations
In the next stage, ‘fleshing out’, I ask that citations for statements above be added along with any examples. Figure 17.2 is an example of the citations added to paragraph 4 above.
FIGURE 17.2: Example of a fleshed out outline of a paragraph in the introduction. In this outline taken from Measey et al. (2020), citations and relevant figures have been inserted for each of the statements.
17.3 An outline for your paragraph
Even if you don’t have your entire chapter planned, you can use an outline to plan what you are going to write in a paragraph. Within this, you can flesh out the contents of sentences before you start writing.
17.4 Lastly it’s time to write the text
And once you have the fleshed out outline, it’s time to start writing your first draft. Remember that the best way to start writing is to do just that. It’s unlikely that your first effort will be the one that you will finally submit. But start writing. Then read, go back and polish. And keep polishing until you achieve your goal.
Having the outline will keep you from forgetting what you planned to say. Once you have the outline my suggestion is always to write in the same document, so that you can quickly refer to what you planned. A common mistake is to delete the plan too early in the writing process. After a lot of revisions and polishing it is all too easy to forget the aim and if you don’t have a copy the temptation is to make something up that fits the text you have. This is why it is important to keep your outline and always refer back to it to make sure that you are on target.
17.5 Keep your outline
You are going to need your outline later on once you have finished writing, so it is important to keep it. It doesn’t matter if you have modified the outline, but you need to keep it so that you can check that you have still included all of the important points that you wanted to make before you started. Once you have finished, you will have a different perspective on these points, and that’s ok. However, you do want to make sure that you didn’t throw away anything important between the planning and the writing.
If you are unsure about how important something previously included was, it is very easy to check by giving the text to a colleague or your advisor to read. Ask them whether there is sufficient information for the reader, or if something is missing. If they spot what you left out, then this is a sure sign you have to put it back in. But if they think it’s fine, maybe you didn’t need it.