Hello! It’s the Writing Wizard, back again to help you with your writing, organizing, thinking, and creating. Today’s topic: how to supersize your outlines. We’ve all been taught how to make an outline in school—think of your ideas, sketch them out vaguely in order, write a bare-bones intro and conclusion, number your topic sentences, etc.
My experience is that, for approximately 99.8% of the population, these sorts of activities don’t lead to better or faster writing.
Sometimes, they even have the opposite effect, stifling the spontaneous creativity that makes good writing pop, or forcing all arguments to be linear, which can dull language and slow tempo. To create a workable plan for writing that still lets your phrases sing, I recommend the concept map. So, you ask, how is a concept map different than an outline?
Well, my friends, the difference resides in how they look on the page – and also in what, exactly, they do. An outline is, of course, largely a structural device used to negotiate the order and development of ideas: here’s my thesis, here’s two supporting arguments, here’s a conclusion. The concept map, however, goes much deeper. A concept map considers what the language needs to DO in order to SAY precisely what I want to say. If an outline is all about the order of ideas, then the concept map is all about how (with what kind of sentence, part of speech, vocabulary word, transition, connector, anecdote, style, etc.) I will move from one idea to another.
The concept map is an outline that accounts for the language I’m using, instead of simply listing the ideas I like. It’s an outline, supersized.
But remember: it’s also more than just an outline with more parts. The concept map specifically asks HOW the language you’ll use in your writing connects to the ideas you’ll be deploying.
A simple outline doesn’t account for this most important of notions – that in good writing, ideas happen IN language and THROUGH language. So if we’re trying to create an efficient plan in advance to help us write, shouldn’t we think about language and content together? If you answered “No!” then congratulations, you’re in the 0.2%. If you said “Yes!” then the concept map is definitely for you.
Here’s what this looks like on the page. Let's say you're arguing in your college admissions materials that Harvard is the best fit for you because it is intimate and intense, while situated right in the middle of the city. An outline for this nugget of wisdom might look like:
WHY HARVARD
--> All the students know each other
--> Coursework is super tough, but kids like it
--> I like cities and it's in the middle of Cambridge/Boston
--> I want a college with a social vibe and an urban vibe but where people work really hard
(Make that one paragraph) ...
But a concept map for the same grouping of ideas will look very different:
WHY HARVARD -- This is going to be one paragraph.
-- The first sentence needs to say something like a thesis statement: Harvard has the kind of environment I love.
(Now I need to explain: what I love + what Harvard has)
--> What I love: Kids who love learning + are really chill with each other + aren't super nerds
--> What Harvard has: chill smart students who aren't totally nerdy
-- Sentence that reveals how those things overlap. Declarative.
-- Now I need a transition to talk about the city.
CITY - CAMBRIDGE/BOSTON
--> Harvard is right there. You have the yard but you also have the city beyond campus.
--> I should talk about how I want to learn outside the classroom, so the city is like the best classroom
(Provide an example. An anecdote? That thing my tour-guide said?)
Etc. ...
As you can see, the difference is that the outline sketches the ideas in order.
The concept map goes one level deeper and organizes the language, structurally and semantically, so that you have in advance a plan for each sentence without having to write out a full draft.
You could walk away from this concept map for a minute or a decade and you could come back to it ready to write right away – no guessing about what kind of language you’d need to get going, and no confusion about how to make your arguments synch back up throughout the composition.
With a concept map, you literally have a play-book of how to construct the composition, from the very beginning.
Now, as I said above, this won't work for everyone. But if you are the kind of writer who is all over the place, or all in your head before writing, the concept map can be a very valuable tool. It forces you to anchor the flow of your language in advance, and quite often, that can make the writing process less nebulous and less random. It will almost definitely make the actual writing less confusing. So, next time you sit down to make an outline, go ahead—supersize it.
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