[haswell]

Regarding outlines, when I was younger, I was always frustrated by the idea that I should somehow be able to summarize something I hadn’t written yet. It just did not compute.

In my professional life, I’ve found that I do start with outlines, but only for specific forms of writing. I spent a bunch of time writing instructional/tutorial content. Stuff like “How to achieve <outcome> using <feature(s)> in <product>”.

I was starting from a position of having expert product knowledge and having to boil that down into a useful post for people who were either beginners, or had knowledge of the product, just not how to achieve <outcome>.

Starting with outlines helped me think about what things this audience would find most useful before diving into the writing process. But that was just a starting point, and the outline would evolve quickly as I got into the actual writing process.

Outside of this, I’ve never found outline-before-writing useful, and see this as an iterative or post-writing exercise if I want to see a high level overview/arc of the content.