An outline is a brief sketch of the “skeleton” of your paper. It should be no more than a page or two long, and should include all of the important ideas in your research, but none of the details.
Why invest the time?
Preparing an outline helps you in two key ways. First, it forces you to think about what it is you really want to say in your paper. To ask: “What are the key points I need to get across to my reader?” This may seem trivial, but unless you can sort out in your own mind what is a critical point and what is a supporting detail, you have no chance of making your reader see the difference.
Secondly, once you have boiled your paper down to its most essential elements, it is much easier to think about how those elements fit together to tell an understandable story. The importance of organization in clear and understandable writing can’t be stressed enough. Does it make sense to put A before B or B before A? Should C and D be grouped together, or does D fit better with E?
Not everyone finds preparing an outline useful, but if you have trouble seeing how your papers should flow, if you often find yourself rewriting large sections, or if you’re consistently getting poor marks on reports, an outline can probably help you.
How to begin
Start by setting out the sections which will form the framework of your paper — Introduction, Methods and Materials, Results, and Discussion. Then start filling in key points under each heading. For your introduction, include what you studied and why. For materials and methods, start with basics. Did you carry out an experiment or an observational study? If an experiment, what did you manipulate and how? For your results, what were the important trends in your data (what patterns did you see)? What was the outcome of your statistical tests? And finally, under discussion, think about what your results mean. Did you find support for the hypothesis being tested, or was it falsified? Were any results unexpected? How do your results compare with other findings?
Now organize
Once you have your key points down, you can work on how they fit together. Try to think from the reader’s point of view. How can you present the information so that it makes sense. What does he or she need to know first, and what should wait. Tips for organizing each paper section can be found in the appropriate resource page. But think also about the overall organization of the paper. If you describe several experiments, try to use parallel formats in your methods and results, so it is crystal-clear which results come from which experiment.
A computer word processor is the ideal way to cut and paste your outline together, but in a pinch a pencil and a pair of scissors will work. You will likely spend an hour or two getting your outline together, but the time you save writing the paper, will more than repay your investment.