What makes a good outline?
According to the OWL guide at Purdue, an outline should satisfy four main criteria. These are parallelism, coordination, subordination, and division. • Parallelism means that all components or ideas follow the same grammatical structure. If Section A is called “Introduction to the Music Industry,” the subsequent sections should be presented in the same manner. A good Section B would be another noun-phrase such as “Music Industry Trends,” as opposed to a question like “What’s Up in the Music Industry?” • Coordination is a type of parallelism that concerns the scope of each idea. Each heading should be of equal depth and scope. A heading called “Popular Musical Instruments” may appear on the same level as “Popular Musicians,” but one called “Bass Guitars” would be better off as a subcategory. • Subordination is where you divide your ideas into even smaller chunks within each heading. For example, the heading “Music Genres” may be divided into subheads like “Rock,” “Pop,” and “Classical.”
