4 Great Tools for Outlining

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share some of the tools that I like best to create outlines for research papers or writing assignments. 

I recently did a video discussing how to organize a research paper or writing assignment.  And in it, I talk about how crucial it is to outline your paper before you start writing.  But what are the best tools for outlining?  In this video, I’ll cover 4 that I like: Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and CarbonFin's Outliner app.  As an example, I'm going to use this outline for an 8-12 page paper.  I think it's important to put as much detail in your outline as you can, including the quotes, references and examples you are going to use to back up your points or arguments, so my outlines are more than just a skeleton of topics -- you can even see I have the URLs for references and studies in there.  The first 2 outlining tools are standard word processors, so you'll make your outline and then begin writing your paper within the outline.  The latter two create reference outlines, so you'd make an outline and then refer to it as you write.  So, first let's talk about 

Microsoft Word

I have to admit, I very rarely use Microsoft Word anymore.  I’ve moved away from software-based computing, to cloud-based computing, so I mostly use Google Docs for word processing now. That said, Word has some particularly good features for outlining — ones that I really wish were available in Google Docs.  So, I'm going to create a new Word document, and paste in my outline.  It doesn't look like much here.  The magic starts to happen when I apply styles.  So, I'm going to make all of my first level topics, Heading 1 and my second level topics, Heading 2.  If you do this in outline view (which you can get to through the View Menu), you can see the outline start to form.  Plus in Outline view, you can change outline level just by tabbing to decrease or shift tabbing to increase.  You can also get rid of the formatting if you think that is distracting and filter by Heading level to only show certain levels of your outline.  You can also double click these plus signs to collapse and expand your sections.  If you are not in Outline view, applying heading styles appears to only change the appearance of these lines, but in fact, you are building your outline hierarchy. Look at this, if I hover over this heading, I get an arrow.  By clicking on the arrow, I can make the entire section collapse under it.  I love this since my outline is so complicated that it is hard to get a big picture view of the paper.  By collapsing all of the top level headings, I can see the bones of my paper much more easily.  I usually choose to put in 2nd level headings as well.  That way, I can also collapse those sections.  If I use Microsoft Word for outlining, I can write my paper directly into the outline (either in Outline view or Regular view) and then collapse those paragraphs underneath the respective headings as I go.  It helps to navigate through a long document and to see the structure of my paper and the arguments that I am making more clearly.  But again, this is Microsoft Word, which I don't use much.  Now let's look at 

Google Docs

So, Google Docs does not allow you to collapse the text under headings, but it does have some outlining capabilities that help with navigating and big picture organization.  So, I'm going to paste my outline into this new Google Docs document.  You can see if I start to apply the style Heading 1 to this section, the text changes, but I do not get an arrow for collapsing like in Word.  So, if I start writing directly into the document and I have 12 pages, the outline gets all spread out into my paper and I can't really use it for navigating.  However, Google Docs has this handy little tab over here to the left that allows you to "Show Document Outline."  If you don't see this, go to the View menu and make sure "Show Document Outline" is checked.  You can see now that I applied the Heading 1 style to all of the top level headings, they are showing up in my outline.  This allows me to see the big picture AND I can use it to navigate through the document.  I generally like to see at least two or three levels down into my document, so I'll apply Heading 2 to this level and so forth.  I tend apply styles using the keyboard shortcuts rather than the mouse, but you'll have to figure out what works for you.  Once I apply all of the heading styles, I get a nice full view of the structure of my paper, which I can also use for navigating almost like a table of contents.  This comes in handy when you are dealing with a paper that is over 10 pages, so you don't have to scroll and scroll.  Plus, I can always hide the outline if I need the screen space for things like answering comments.  I've started using this for most of my papers that I write.  Okay — these first two tools were just using some of the features of your word processing software to help you outline and then writing directly into that outline.  The next two tools create an outline that you will use for reference as you write. 

Google Sheets

If you've watched some of my other videos on writing papers, you may know that I keep my citations and references in a Google Spreadsheet.  I find it easy to store my sources on one tab and all of the quotes and citations from those sources on another that references back to the original source.  You can also use a Google spreadsheet to create an outline.   The key here is to use each column as a different level of the outline.  All of your top level sections are listed in the first column, second level goes in the second column and so on.  You can hide the rows under a heading manually, but as long as you don't allow your rows to wrap, the outline stays more concise than it looks in a word processing document.  Wrapping the lines looks like this, not wrapped look like this -- much more compact, right?  Obviously, you wouldn't start to write your paper directly into this spreadsheet, plus its not as easy to add and delete rows, but it's not a bad way to construct an outline to use for reference as you write your paper, particularly if your references are stored in this spreadsheet.  And lastly,

Carbonfin Outliner iOS App

The last tool that I use with some regularity is the Outliner iOS App / website -- unfortunately, I don't think it is compatible with Android yet.  It was important to me to have an app that synced with a website, so that I had access to it both on my iPad and on my computer.  With Outliner, you create an account and it syncs your outlines between your devices.  I also like that you can collapse sections to see the big picture view of your outline.  This is not meant to be a full tutorial of the Outliner app, I'll do one of those soon, but basically, you create an outline, add headings or subheadings, or however many levels to your outline through these buttons up here.  You can also choose to decrease or increase the level once you've added it.  Use these arrows to the left of the line to collapse the section.  Each line also has room for a note so that you can store web addresses or other references.  In order to ensure that this is available on your iPad and on your computer, you'll have to Sync it (or on the website, Save it).  I have found that I will build the outline on my iPad and refer to it while I'm writing on my computer, but that I will also bring up the Outliner website on my computer so that I can cut and paste quotations or websites as I'm writing.  

And that's it.  These are the outlining tools that I have used: Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Outliner.  But let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!