has it been a while since you made an outline? that makes sense! this is a typical “learn to write” exercise that can feel rote, or even too simple for a complex academic piece.
but outlines are magic for a few reasons! i strongly recommend them to all my clients, and here are just a few of the reasons why!
outlines are also a really good way to organize information. when you are in the midst of a big research project, it can be really overwhelming to start to say "okay, these things belong in this category of ideas” or “these these ideas relate to this section here." an outline can help give you a place to put those information, those ideas as they assemble themselves into a document so that you don't lose them. it also is a great active note-taking activity for those heavy research seasons!
so rather than a process that looks like:
read all the things
flail around
start to write
look around for what you read to put it in
it can look more like
read a thing
take some notes
put that thing in an outline, if it’s relevant
read more things
adjust outline
who cares if you end up moving things around? it’s so much easier to move things around in an outline than it is to restructure a 60 page zero draft. this way, you’re keeping an eye on what you want to produce while you’re researching, which also makes it a little more likely that you won’t over or under research as much, as well.
the other thing that outlines gonna be really, really useful for is giving you a list of tasks to complete. so many of my clients come to me and say, "okay, I've had '[write chapter' on my list to do for the last week and I don't know where to start. I don't know what that means. I look at it on my to do list. I'm so overwhelmed!"
an outline can actually help you naturally break down that big task as you start to draft this chapter into smaller pieces that you can put on into it to do list, and break into more manageable chunks.
if you have the introduction of your chapter outline, and you know that there are four bullet points and there are three bullet sub points underneath each one of those main points, then you can say: "today I want to write up the first bullet point, all three of the sub points today.” this is much easier to wrap your mind around than "write the introduction to this chapter." the outline can help you start to see the smaller steps and then take them, which, as we know, could be a lot less intimidating.
plus, despite what you may have heard, an outline IS writing. it helps you organize information, it brings together your original thinking and your research - of course it counts! an outline can feel less intimidating that starting with a first, or even a zero draft. so experiment with using them to see if they can help you visualize the small steps of your project just a little bit better.