Transcripts
1. Introduction: Welcome to the outlining
for beginners class. My name is Armand rotary, the Finder over money talks, a media company which
helps engineers and entrepreneurs improve their
communication skills. One of the ways that
I've been able to grow the Armani talks
brand is through the use of writing books, blogs, and a lot of other
different content pieces. For certain amounts of
these content pieces, I was able to bring it forth
through the use of outlines. Outlining is the secret weapon for whenever you are
creating content. Because it takes the
complexity out of things, boils it down to the
simplicity by having the skeleton on what you want your content
piece to be about. A lot of the times,
you'll see that your content piece pretty
much writes itself. In this beginner's class, you're going to understand
what exactly is an outline, the benefits of outlining
the parts of an outline. And I'm going to give
you this little hack in order to create better
outlines for yourself. In the end, we will have a final project that
will allow you to create your own personal
outline so you can bring your content pieces to life if you're ready and
excited for this class, I look forward to
seeing you inside.
2. What Are Outlines?: And outline is
simply a skeleton. Whenever you're
picturing a human being, Let's say you picture the
human being with a skeleton. What happens? You take the
flesh out of the picture, and now you're just
seeing skulls and bones. The skulls and bones are very much needed because
without that, a human being is simply
going to be a blob. And it's very similar
with content creation. When you have that skeleton. Now, you have a certain
structure to your content piece. Be it a blog, a bulk sample essay, whatever. Once you have that skeleton, you have much more clarity. Once you have that clarity, it's sort of like a map from going from
point a to point B. And after that, you just put
the flesh on the skeleton, aka using words, using
beautiful tonality, making your points effectively. But just view the
outline as a skeleton. The skeleton that allows everything else
to hang upon. It.
3. Benefits of Outlining: Now I'd be lying if I
said that outlines are always needed and
plenty of situations, outlines are not needed. E.g. if I'm writing
a fiction book, I don't really like
outlines too much because I like unpredictability. But whenever I'm writing
non-fiction books, the outlines help
out tremendously. You're going to have
to experiment for yourself because there are a lot of fiction authors
that love to outline. And there's a lot of
nonfiction writers, they don't like to outline. Every writer is different. But if you're curious
about some of the benefits of
outlining, here it is. Number one, you don't ramble as much because when you have that skeleton and you kept revising it over and over again, what happens is that, you know, which points
you want to make. And if you're very
detailed with the outline, you know, the sub points
you want to make as well. This takes away the
tendency to ramble. Because human beings, if you give them the
opportunity to ramble, they often, well, it
feels very good for them. So that's one benefit. Another benefit is
that you have clarity. It's like if you're new
to a state and I tell you to go to the nearby a Walmart and you don't have
a GPS or anything, can you eventually
stumble upon the Walmart? Yeah. But chances are
you're going to take a lot of unnecessary roads. You're going to waste a lot
of time with the outline. You pretty much have this GPS that just guides you
through the entire process. And another benefit
of the outline is that it helps you be much more well-thought out during
the outlining process. What's happening is that
you're pretty much thinking. You're like. I was going to create an entire section
for this particular topic. But this particular topic is no different than this
particular topic. How about I merge these
two ideas into one. You're thinking. The more
that you're thinking, the more clarity that you have. So the benefits of outlining
are definitely there. And the more that you
understand the benefits, the more likely that you're
going to do it for yourself.
4. 2 Parts of an Outline: So the two parts
of an outline or the theme and the bullets. For the next two videos,
we're going to break down the team and the bullets.
5. Theme: The theme is the essence of what your content piece
is going to be about. We want a very general theme. If we want the content
piece to be very long, and we want a very
specific theme. If we want the
content piece to be short, let me give
you an example. If I just write public speaking, then that theme is very general. Chances are that I'm going to write an entire book about it. But let's say I don't
want to write an entire book about it. Instead, I want to talk about public speaking from the
lens of a short little blog. So in this situation,
unlike how to deal with speech anxiety
the night before a speech, this is a very specific theme. And this narrows down
my general knowledge of public speaking into
something much more narrow. And once I have either one
of these themes from there, I'm capable of
creating the bullets.
6. Bullets: The next part or the bullets. The bullets are simply sections in order to chop the theme down into digestible
components for the consumer. So let's say I chose the
theme of public speaking. I'm planning on writing
a book about it. The bullets include
introduction, history of public
speaking, speech, anxiety, how to practice
public speaking. These are the overview
of the bullets. Now, to make it even
more digestible, I can create sub-bullets, right? So for speech, anxiety, Let's say one of the sub-bullets is emotions versus feelings. Another sub-bullet is what to do if you have
speech anxiety. The other sub-bullet is how to redirect speech anxiety
towards your favor. With bullets. We're pretty much just
chopping this theme down into a digestible
way for the consumer. I still work in
subway for some time. And I recall I used to
make these big subs. And once I made these big subs, I would often cut
it down the half. But every now and then, a mom would come with her
two little kids. She'd be like, Sir, instead of chopping
this up into two parts, can you chop it down
into four parts? Because my kids
there's so little. I just want to be safe
with how they chew. I'm like, sure I could
do something like that. And as I was chopping
it into four parts, I started to see that chopping
a sub is very similar to chopping the theme of whatever content piece
that you're writing. So the bottom line is that the
theme is going to give you direction and the bullets
slash sub-bullet slash sub, sub bullets are going
to help you chop that theme into
digestible parts.
7. Analyze Table of Contents: Okay, I'm gonna give you a secret that's going to
help you out tremendously. You ready for it. In order
to become a better outliner? Which you want to do is look at the table of
contents within books. Trust me, you do not want
to miss this advice at all because it will help
you out tremendously. And here's why. Whenever you're looking at the table
of contents and books, what are you really looking at? You're looking at
someone's outline. Now, they may be
dumbing it down a lot. Or some authors are putting it up in a very
detailed sort of way. E.g. if you look at a textbook, a lot of these textbooks
have detailed outlines. It's so detailed to a point where the book pretty
much wrote itself. Why would other books, the outlines are very
general and these sorts of books have a different
feel than these books. The more that you
get in the habit of looking at the table of contents and consuming
it in a mindful manner. The more inspiration that you
have for your own outlines. So try it out for
yourself and you'll notice there's a lot of clarity that's being added into this ambiguous
field of outlining.
8. Final Project: Alright, You made it to
the end of the class. Now let's get started
with the final project. For the final
project, I'm going to give you a theme
and from the team, I want you to create your own bullets and
sub-bullets if needed. The theme is how Person
B should conquer a fear. For person B, you
could insert a name. It could be billy, it
could be your name. So that's the theme.
How should a person be conquer a fear from that? Create your own outline with
bullets and sub-bullets. Once you have looked at the
skeleton of this outline, you feel as though it's
ready for publishing, where you're going to create
content piece out of it. Don't create the content
piece out of it yet. Okay, just get that outline and post it in the final project
section right below. And once you post it and you still have that inspiration of, I could maybe write
a blog about this. Go ahead and write that
on your free time. But the main purpose of this
final project is to get that outline and post it in
the final project section, I look forward to
seeing what type of skeleton that you created. If you enjoyed this beginner's
class on outlining, and you want to learn more
about creative writing, more about content creation, public speaking, much more. Check out our money talks.com, which has plenty of
my blogs or videos, podcasts, books, a much
more are monotonic.com. Go on and check it out.
Arman Chowdhury, Confidence thru Communication
