 In this video, I want to discuss the importance of outlining your presentation in advance and how to go about doing so. So first of all, let's talk about why outlining is important when preparing to give a presentation. First of all, outlining allows you to test the scope of your presentation to make sure that you have an appropriate level of depth and breadth of information that you're sharing and that you have the right amount to fit within the prescribed time for your presentation as well. Outlining also allows you to examine the relationships between the different ideas that are part of your presentation and see it all kind of together. Outlining allows you to align the supporting material effectively and make sure that your supporting materials are where they should be, that they are under the appropriate main points and that they're doing their job by supporting those main points. It allows you to look for balance. In other words, it's one main point extensively more involved than the others. And if so, how can we balance out those main ideas to a certain extent or degree? Finally, outlining helps you stay on track. It keeps you from veering off on the different rabbit trails as you're preparing your speech and as you're putting your materials together and allows you to look at things and say, okay, does this all fit within the main idea and under that main ideas umbrella? So now that we know that why outlining is important, let's take a look at the different types of outlines that we have that we can use. First of all, we have what we call preparation outline. As the name would indicate, this preparation outline is used in advance of your presentation. It's what you would use when you're putting this information together. And it's going to be pretty thorough, as we'll discuss. It should be fairly thorough, but it's what you would use when you're putting all this information together so that you can kind of look at things like the scope and the relationship between these things and the alignment of those supporting ideas. All of those things would happen as you're preparing your preparation outline. Then you're also going to have a delivery outline, which may be a little less formal, maybe less detailed. It's going to be just your speaking notes, essentially, the notes that you need to remind you of what it is you wanted to talk about and point you in the right direction to help keep you on track for giving an effective presentation. So when you think about the preparation outline, there are a few things we want to keep in mind that we want to make sure that we're doing. First of all, preparation outline should use full sentences. As you can see in the introduction area, the body area, these are all full sentences. It's almost like a manuscript. It's not a full manuscript, but it's built essentially like a manuscript using full sentences. We want to use the principle of coordination, which is the idea that main ideas ought to be together, subordinate ideas ought to be together and coordinated in the same way, indented at the same level, so that we can identify, quick, okay, this is a supporting idea for main point one or main point two or whatever it is. So coordination means everything ought to be lined up in that way. Subordination means that things ought to be grouped underneath those areas to which they are subordinate. So the supporting material for main point one should be located underneath in an indented in an indented way, but underneath main point one and the same for the supporting points for main point two and so forth. That information that relates to a higher level topic ought to be located beneath that topic within the outline. That's how to label the constituent parts. So you can see here I've labeled my introduction, I've labeled the body so that I can clearly delineate between those two things, differentiate between those two things and keep the flow of my speech in clear order. We also finally should look for balance. We should look at this to make sure that all the ideas are balanced in a way. It doesn't have to be exactly balanced in the same exact same amount of time, but if one main point has a ton of information and another has very little, then we either need to balance that out by shifting some of that information or cutting back on one and adding to the other or cutting the smaller one all together and just expanding the other points if they're that important. As far as the delivery outline goes, delivery outline should be made up of keywords and phrases. It should not be full sentences. It should not be as detailed or as large in a full sheet of paper as your preparation outline. These should be smaller. Your delivery outline should be on note cards and only use keywords and phrases. We're still going to use the principles coordination and subordination. So coordination, making sure all those bullet points match up out there and then we're using the same kind of indentation and same kind of markation for the subordinate points. There, as you can see, instead of bullet points, we're using hyphens to differentiate and they are indented that as well. Finally, we can include some different delivery cues. If we know we're having trouble in one section and we need to remind ourselves of things, we can add things like eye contact or remind ourselves of visual aids by writing in show chart here. Now, you want to be sure you remember not to say those things out loud, obviously, if they're on your delivery cues, but they can be very helpful in keeping you on track, reminding you to do things. We can add delivery cues for sure to our delivery outline and have them available as part of that outline. Hopefully, this gives you a better idea of why outlining is important and some of the things we can do to create effective outlines. If you have questions about how to create effective outlines, please feel free to email me. I'd love to hear from you there. In the meantime, I hope that you have a renewed understanding of why outlining is important and a way to outline a speech for the most effective delivery of a presentation.