Online Writing Center

Outline Writing

Upon your decision about working on a topic, you often brain storm, create ideas, write down your ideas and try to step into the real stage of writing where your ideas are expected to stand up skillfully and correctly.  In this pre-writing stage, you need the skills to put your ideas and what you have collected from the literature precisely and concisely. In fact, you need an outline to organize your ideas, prevent “writer’s block”, avoid repetition, and present a structured writing. An outline is like the plan of a building which provides you with a view from above with arrangement of different spaces.  An outline helps you move from one part to the other part in an orderly way. For example, if your plan is to show the importance of Health Information Systems in general, describe the situation of health information system in your country in particular, and explain the gap in research it can be shown as follows:

I. Introduction

A. Importance of health information system

  1. In the world (Brown, et al, Smith, et al……)
  2. In the country (x, et al, y, et al…..)

B. Gap

  1. Few studies on the topic
  2. No studies on the evaluation of the system

C. Purpose

  1. Assess the situation in the country
  2. Evaluate the adoption of the system

II. Method

A. …..

B. ……

C. ……

D. …..

III. Results

A. …..

B. ……

IV. Discussion and Conclusion

A. …..

B. ……

C. ……

The outline above shows that the paper will have four main ideas, and each main idea will be supported by some supporting information. For a better understanding of an outline the following links are suggested:

https://www.aims.edu/student/online-writing-lab/process/outline

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/how-to-write-outline/

https://owl.purdue.edu/search.html?q=outline%20writing%20

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