Most high schools in the United State focus on formal outlining as a way of organizing students’ papers or essays. According to Kristin Milligan, in her essay “Formal outlines are always useful,” in the book Bad Ideas About writing, believes that “formal outlines are always useful” is a bad idea about writing because she believes it inhibits the development of writing skills of students. In Wavoord Barbara E. et al’s article of “Functions of outlining among college students in four disciplines” looked at the role outlines play in students’ work, especially how students can incorporate different writing strategies with the outlines. In Flower and Hayes’ article of “Problem-solving strategies and the writing process” focused on the writing process which highlighted individual differences of students and how they approach writing as a communication problem to be solved. From all these sources the better idea about writing here is that students should adapt the use of outlines with other strategies to enhance the development of their writing process. “Formal outlines” are not supposed to be mandatory. Rather, they should be made flexible such that students can easily adjust and adapt the use of it as and when necessary. This essay tends to focus on students and teachers, as they are the main users of mandatory outlines for them to embrace the idea of adapting the use of outlines to suit each students’ individual differences of the writing process.
Formal outlines just help students to organize their ideas quickly without going into details or helping them to develop these ideas to make a better argument or take a position on the topic they are writing on. The formal outlines given by teachers just focus students’ attention on the organization or how the essay should look like after they are done, which just makes the outlines a priority rather than directing their focus towards the writing process. According to Milligan, “instead of only choosing a familiar and mandated organizational form, students should be allowed to use the strategies that work best with their own intelligence to foster their growth” (Milligan, 164). Based on this idea, it would be more beneficial if teachers would always consider the uniqueness of their students when assigning papers to them. Individual differences and how each student approach learning, or writing plays an important role on the extent to which teachers make outlining of assignments mandatory for their students. One major thing teachers need to consider is, to make assignments open enough to cater for the different learning characteristics each of their students come on board with so that they can learn to adapt and incorporate different strategies in their writing process. This is to help students develop their writing skills and improve upon their writing process and be able to make a better argument on a topic without just concentrating on meeting the assignment requirements.
Being aware of one’s own writing process is very helpful when one is writing a paper that is somehow complex, and he or she is able to strategize to incorporate different strategies into the writing process. The use of mandatory outlines tends to hinder the development of this writing skill since most teachers don’t take individual differences into consideration when assigning writing papers. Every writer has their own writing process and a continuous practice helps them to improve upon these processes. Writing is a messy practice that needs to be seen as a communication problem. In solving this problem, students need to incorporate different strategies in their writing process which the use of formal outlines tends to hinder. Opening up the writing process for students to become aware of their individual differences helps them to strategize when they become stuck at a point in writing a paper. According to Flower and Hayes “an even more compelling way to organize a paper is to simply follow the pattern of your own discovery process” (Flower and Hayes p.459). This means that the when students become aware of their own writing process and what works for them would mold them to become better writers. This self-awareness can help them to adapt their strategies when faced with complex situation of generating an idea as they work on their papers or essays.
The use of mandatory outlines tend to hinder creativity in students’ paper, especially not being able to address their readers and turn their attention in a particular direction and being able to sustain it throughout the writing process. Creativity here means students are able to adapt their writing skills or combine it with other strategies in developing one’s ideas in such a way that it arouses the interest of their readers to keep reading till the end. The flexibility in the use of outlines can be demonstrated by students as they interestingly combined this with other writing processes when assignments papers are open enough, Walvoord et al acknowledges that “students used to outline recursively, interspersed with other writing strategies” (p. 416). The use of outlines recursively encourages students to explore multiple writing strategies at every stage of the writing process that can help in their personal skills development. Milligan also pinpointed that “when students decide to adapt outlines to benefit their personal writing method, it reinforces the fact that writing is recursive and a non-linear process” (Milligan p. 165). Using outlines recursively brings out quality in student paper which tends to foster this creativity and focuses students attention on developing their ideas in an interesting way that helps them to approach their work with authority and voice without just writing their paper in a linear hierarchical structure just to meet the teacher’s expectations.
In conclusion, the aim of this paper is not to write off the use of formal outlines rather to promote the adaptation of outlines in combination with other writing strategies to enhance the writing skills of students. Though formal outlines are good, teachers should not encourage students to stick to this style of writing but should urge them to be more dynamic with their writing skills so that they can be able to handle any kind of writing assignments, even the most complex and frustrating ones, “in doing so, there’s possibility that students’ beliefs about their writing efficacy will increase” (Milligan p. 164). With the hope of increasing flexibility and opening up the writing process to promote self-awareness,this would also help students to become more confident in their writing skills, even those that lack the ability to change their tactics when faced with frustrations of trying to generate an idea especially when they have less or no idea about the topic they are writing on, “although the writer has alternative procedures she or he may not have enough self-conscious awareness of his or her skills to invoke them when needed” (Flower and Hayes p.451). This awareness can bring to bear in the minds of students that writing is an important skill they can master. Further research can be done by analyzing the effect of individual differences on the writing process.
CITATION
Milligan, Kristin. “Formal Outlines Are Always Useful.” BAD IDEAS: 163.
Walvoord, Barbara E., et al. “Functions of Outlining Among College Students in Four Disciplines” Research in the Teaching of English (1995): 390-421.
Flower, Linda S., and John R. Hayes. “Problem-Solving Strategies and the Writing Process.” College English 39.4 (1977): 449-461.