Fall 2023 Post 06: Fat Outlines and Bard

I assign outlines for my composition students. I suspect they don't like it, so why do I do it? Because outlines can help students become better readers and writers. And reading does come first.

And now that I'm using Bard in the classroom, I find it even easier and more instructive to use outlines. Bard is really good at generating an outline for almost any kind of writing, usually in under sixty seconds, and if you don't like the first outline Bard generates, then you can prompt it to generate countless more until you are comfortable. I know from experience that outlines work for many people. Even experienced writers write better documents.

In his post entitled "On fat outlines and shitty first drafts," my favorite professional writer and blogger Josh Bernoff explodes the myth that professional writers (by professional he means people who get paid for their writing, including people who write emails to business customers and colleagues) can simply sit down at the computer and knock out perfect prose at will. He says pointedly: "The idea that you would just sit down and write a beautiful draft is deluded. The best writers do this on the best days; you, on the other hand, have to work even when you are not the best writer and it is not the best day."

As an example of his point, I'll share a personal anecdote. I took a graduate course at the University of Miami with Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, and he claimed that he wrote every morning from 7:00 until lunch, and that four out of five days, he threw it in the trash. (Being a cheeky grad student, I asked him if I could take out his trash for him. He declined my offer.) So accept it: if a Nobel prize winning author seldom writes a perfect first draft, chances are that you and I never will.

Of course, all my students want to be one-draft wonders. They want to sit down and knock out a perfect A+ essay off the top of their heads on any topic on demand. In forty years of teaching writing, I have had one student who could do that: a 14-year-old Jewish teenager in Miami who was already in college. She knew more about writing than I ever will, and I taught her nothing. Sadly, students, you and I are not that gifted young Jewish woman. We have to work at writing. I know that I do, and I know that most of you do, too.

Fortunately, Bernoff suggests two main strategies for working your way through to polished writing:

• fat outlines
• shitty first drafts

Start writing by moving through your shitty first draft as quickly as possible. You can't turn that in, so get over with quickly. Bard can help you do that, so use it.

I'll tell you a story to illustrate (teaching moment: note that I'm using another personal anecdote to illustrate a claim that I am making about first drafts being shitty. Personal anecdotes are effective in blog posts and magazine articles, but they are not often used in academic writing.): When I was earning my master's degree at Arkansas State University, I thought I was going to be a poet. One morning in 1977, I dashed off a poem, ripped it out of my typewriter (this was BPC, Before Personal Computers), and took it down to my major professor for a review. Prof Harwell looked at it cursorily, dropped it onto a stack of papers to grade, and said, "I'll get back to you." I waited expectantly for weeks for him to tell me that I was clearly a future Nobel prize winning author, but I heard nothing. About two months later, the poem was in my office mailbox, and Prof. Harwell had scrawled in angry red ink a simple message: A first draft is almost always an imposition. Don't do this again.

Harwell was right, and I have avoided ever submitting a first draft again. You shouldn't do it either. Your first draft is always an imposition. Don't submit it. Yeah, I know: you've struggled until you're sick of it to write 800 words, and you want to move on. Forget it. You've just started writing.

So if first drafts are usually no good, what works?

Fat outlines, Bernoff says. He says outlines work if they are complete, or fat. He is dismissive of the bare outline: "A regular outline includes just the heads and subheads of what you intend to write. It is useless. It is easy to create, but does not help you much when you sit down to write." I see his point, but I think he overstates it. A regular, bare outline at least gets you started, and it is easier than a fat outline — though I suspect you will agree with me that it is not always "easy to create." However, Bard can create twenty outlines for every one outline that you can create. Use Bard. For me, the biggest benefit of the bare outline is that it lets you see the large main ideas that you want to write about without all the details. This is especially helpful for moving those big ideas around as you try to find a suitable organizational pattern for your document. And you can use Bard to rearrange outlines almost instantly. Try it.

So what is a fat outline? Bernoff says:

A fat outline is everything you intend to put in a chapter. It includes quotes, graphics, insights, statistics, tossed off paragraphs, and anything else you can think of. You arrange those items into a logical order and put some heads in. A fat outline takes work, although it is a different kind of work from writing. It is the work of research and organization. And it is easy to create, because there are no constraints whatsoever. (You can write the whole thing in repetitive passive jargon-filled run-on sentences and fragments if that makes it easier.) 

Unlike the traditional outline, the fat outline is very helpful when you sit down to write. With the fat outline in front of you, you have all the ingredients at hand, and the recipe is laid out in order. All that’s left is the cooking. Cooking is still hard, but if you hadn’t collected the ingredients and the recipe, it would be much harder.

I think he's nailed it as I often use both strategies for the same document.

As Singer taught me, four out of five times, your first draft is not good enough, even if you are a Nobel prize winner. It certainly is not good enough to turn in to your instructor. It is useful only for getting some ideas down so that you can keep the good ones and delete or fix the bad ones. I know – I write tons of shitty first drafts. But I don't turn them in or submit them for publication. I fix them or discard them. That's the biggest difference between experienced writers and novice writers. Novice writers think their first draft is good enough, experienced writers know that the first draft is never good enough. My job in this class is to turn you into an experienced writer – or at least, a more experienced writer.

Chances are that the writer of the essays that I ask you to read in this class used something like a fat outline. I did a fat outline for this post I'm writing, though I cheated a bit. I did write this post all in one sitting, though I have now revised it a few times for my different classes, but I can do that because I have been writing and studying writing for 50 years — I started college in 1969, and I read Bernoff's post about fat outlines a year before I wrote this post. I've read thousands of academic essays about writing and rhetoric (I had to read 200 essays just for my doctoral comprehensive examination in 1982). I've put in my 10,000 hours of gathering quotes, graphics, insights, statistics, and more so that I can write a post about writing in one sitting. Most of you will have to read and write for the next 50 years to catch up with me. You will certainly have to write more than one draft to earn a good grade in my class.

And by the way, none of us will catch up with the reading that Bard has done. Bard has come very close to reading every text and viewing every image on the Net. How much is that? An unimaginable amount. Google Search says:

In 2023, Statista estimates that there were 120 zettabytes (ZB) of data on the internet. A zettabyte is equal to 1,000 exabytes, or 1 trillion gigabytes. 

The amount of data on the internet is constantly growing. In 2017, there were 2.7 ZB of data. In 2019, there were 4.4 ZB of data. In 2025, IDC predicts that there will be 175 ZB of data. 

The amount of data being produced every day is also growing exponentially. Estimates suggest that at least 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day. 

The big four online storage and service companies, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, store at least 1,200 petabytes between them. That's 1.2 million terabytes.

If the Internet stopped today, and if everyone in the world – if everyone who ever lived – started reading today, we would never read all the stuff on the Net. We couldn't even read all the stuff that is going to be added tomorrow. Only computers come close to doing that, and that's one reason why I'm teaching you to use Bard. Good writing starts with good reading, and you can't read enough. I'm not sure that Bard can read it all, but I know it can read a hell of a lot more than you and I can.

So get to it. Learn to throw away your first draft and do a fat outline. Run your stuff by Bard several times to get feedback on your first draft. And probably your second and third drafts. Though Bard can help you to write more quickly, good writing is hard work, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If it was easy, everybody would do it. Even Bard.