Outline

Research

A skeleton plan of a paper's sections and sub-arguments, sketched out before drafting so the overall structure holds together before sentence-level writing begins.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — outline merriam-webster.com accessed 22 September 2026

Of Merriam-Webster’s several noun senses, the relevant ones are “a condensed treatment of a particular subject”, “a summary of a written work : synopsis”, and — closest to this entry — “a preliminary account of a project : plan”. First recorded as a noun in 1662. The older senses are visual — a line marking the limits of a figure — and the planning sense keeps that idea: an outline shows a paper’s shape before any of it is filled in.

Merriam-Webster is cited as the dictionary of record: where an entry defines a word rather than a position, a dictionary is the primary source for it. How the term is used in research writing, above, is this lexicon’s own reading.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

Rewritten from a truncated AJG archive entry, August 2026.