Outlining: Pros
- You won’t get stuck. You’ll never come to the end of a paragraph and have no idea how to begin the next one, because you’ll have it written down in the outline.
- It can save a lot of time. The longer a project happens to be, the more you’ll appreciate having an outline to work off of.
- We all outline, to be honest. When freewriting, you do have something of an outline, you just keep it in your head. Writing it down just helps you to stay a little more organized.
Outlining: Cons
- It’s extra labor. An outline for a one page blog post can come out to half a page. That can slow you down as much as it helps you.
- It can be restrictive. If you enjoy writing on instinct, you may find an outline difficult to stick to.
But here’s the sneaky thing about outlining: It doesn’t have to look any particular way. Sometimes it’s a messy web of scribbled arrows and half-formed ideas, or maybe it’s just a bulleted list in your notes app that only makes sense to you. The “outline = rigid structure” mindset is a bit of a myth; nobody’s judging your process except, well, maybe your future self if you make it unreadable. At the end of the day, whatever keeps you moving forward instead of staring at a blank screen for an hour is probably the better approach, even if it doesn’t look like some English teacher’s dream.
And if you’re working collaboratively, a lightweight outline can save a lot of explaining—or awkward rewrites—later on. There’s nothing more quietly defeating than realizing halfway through a team project that you’re not even writing the same article. A few quick headers, a couple notes, and suddenly everyone’s on the same page (or at least fighting fewer battles over the Google Doc).
Freewriting: Pros
- You don’t lose any momentum. When you sit down and want to jump right into writing, freewriting means you don’t have to stop and chart it out before you can get started.
- It’s fast. Outlining a one-page piece may only take a couple minutes, but that’s a couple minutes you’re not spending writing.
Freewriting: Cons
- It’s easy to write yourself into a corner. It’s a little like taking a road trip without a map. You might discover all sorts of new sights, but you could also wind up wasting fuel on backtracking and dead ends.
- It takes practice. If you’re new to writing, it can be difficult getting to the point where you can write without an outline and still get your points across.
It’s up to you how you want to approach writing (it’s no wonder some people in marketing just hire experts to handle that part for them). Whether you want to outline or freewrite or flip through the dictionary selecting words at random. The method is only a way to get the results that you’re after.
