Why bullets are dangerous in book outlines
- Teabags
- Tea pot
- Milk
- Sugar
- The importance of boiling water
- Loose leaf?
If you plan a chapter that way, you'll end up with a mini-essay on each topic. "Now lets talk about teabags. Teabags are very important. They work by putting dried tea in a porous paper packet". But readers usually learn more from understanding the connection between ideas than we do from the ideas themselves. It's bringing ideas together that gives readers understanding.
We use the word "coherent" to mean "understandable". The origin of the word has to do with "all the bits stick together well" -- the cohere. They connect. Instead of outlining your book in bullets, why not try to describe each chapter in a paragraph? That way, you can see if there is a logical connection between each idea... and you can start to see those connections right from the start: First of all we'll look at teabags, which are the most common way of making tea today. We'll see how to use teabags with a teapot and also with a mug. Once the tea is made, people like to take it in different ways -- so we'll look at adding milk and sugar, the most popular ways to take tea. We'll see why it's so important to use boiling water when you make tea, and wrap up the chapter with an advanced tea making technique -- loose leaf. Now somebody who doesn't know much about tea will understand the progression of ideas in the chapter, and even if they don't know about they ideas themselves they do all connect together in a clear way. it can also reveal gaps in the progression that aren't obvious in bullet form (what about lemon? should we cover making tea in the mug?)Form a plan that brings ideas together instead of tearing them apart with a barrage of bullets.
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