A sentence outline is a tool for composing a document, such as an essay, a paper, a book, or even an encyclopedia.
A reverse outline is a list of sentences or topics that is created from an existing work, as a revision tool; it may show the gaps in the document's coverage so that they may be filled, and may help in rearranging sentences or topics to improve the structure and flow of the work.
Propædia is the historical attempt of the Encyclopædia Britannica to present a hierarchical "Outline of Knowledge" in a separate volume in the 15th edition of 1974.
Each numeral or letter is followed by a period, and each item is capitalized, as in the following sample: Thesis statement: E-mail and internet monitoring, as currently practiced, is an invasion of employees' rights in the workplace.
Some call the Roman numerals "A-heads" (for "A-level headings"), the upper-case letters, "B-heads", and so on.
The scheme recommended by the MLA Handbook,[8] and the Purdue Online Writing Lab,[9] among others, uses the usual five levels, as described above, then repeats the Arabic numerals and lower-case letter surrounded by parentheses (round brackets) – I.
In common practice, lower levels yet are usually Arabic numerals and lowercase letters again, and sometimes lower-case Roman again, with single parentheses – 1) a) i) – but usage varies.
[citation needed] Many oft-cited style guides besides the APA Publication Manual, including the AP Stylebook, the NYT Manual, Fowler, The Guardian Style Guide, and Strunk & White, are silent on the topic.
One side effect of the use of both Roman numerals and uppercase letters in all of these styles of outlining is that in most alphabets, "I."
The points or topics are extracted from the work, and are arranged in their order of presentation, by section, in the outline.
An integrated outline is generally prepared after the scholar has collected, read and mastered the literature that will be used in the research paper.
An integrated outline can be a helpful tool for people with writer's block because the content of the paper is organized and identified prior to writing.
"[14] Writers of fiction and creative nonfiction, such as Jon Franklin,[15] may use outlines to establish plot sequence, character development and dramatic flow of a story, sometimes in conjunction with free writing.
Preparation of an outline is an intermediate step in the process of writing a scholarly research paper, literature review, thesis or dissertation.
Professors often hand out to their students at the beginning of a term, a summary of the subjects to be covered throughout the course in the form of a topic outline.
It is a computer program, or part of one, used for displaying, organizing, and editing hierarchically arranged text in an outline's tree structure.
Textual information is contained in discrete sections called "nodes", which are arranged according to their topic-subtopic (parent-child) relationships, sort of like the members of a family tree.
Outliners are used for storing and retrieving textual information, with terms, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs attached to a tree.
In other words, as a hand-written work an outline is a writing tool, but on a computer, it is a general purpose format supported by a robust development and display medium capable of handling knowledge from its creation to its end use.
Outliners are ideal for managing lists, organizing facts and ideas, and for writing computer programs.