← Chapter 8
Oral Communication · Chapter 8

The Outline Doctor

Here is a real-shaped first draft with four things wrong with it. You get four tools — a shape switcher, a division fixer, a subordination swap, and a splitter. Use them and watch the outline’s four rules come back one at a time. The point of a full-sentence outline is that it fails on paper, cheaply, in private.

Repair bench

TOOL 1Shape switcher
Rewrites all three main points into one grammatical form. Siblings should share a shape — and in a full-sentence outline, that shape has to be a sentence.
TOOL 2Division fixer — Point II
Point II promises three practices and names one. If you divide something you get at least two parts, so an A requires a B. Add the siblings it is missing.
TOOL 3Subordination swap — I.B
Put “because” or “for example” between a parent and its child. If the sentence stops making sense, the child does not belong there. Replace I.B.
TOOL 4Singularity splitter — III.A
If a line has an “and” in the middle joining two claims, it is two lines. One idea per entry, or none of them can be supported properly.

The outline, live

The four rules

0of 4 rules holding