Outline as a Working Hypothesis · Method

Purpose

Most people outline at the end of research, once they know what they found. Umberto Eco suggests the opposite. In How to Write a Thesis he advises writing a provisional table of contents early and treating it as a working hypothesis: your best current guess about what the finished work will contain, in what order.

His comparison is a long car trip. With a week to drive 600 miles, you wouldn’t just leave the house and head in a random direction. You’d make a rough plan, knowing you’ll change it on the road. The provisional table of contents is that plan. Eco says it does three things: it makes you clear about what you want to do, it lets you explain the project to an adviser, and it tests whether your ideas are as clear as they feel. Plenty of projects seem clear in your head and fall apart the moment you try to write them down in order.

The outline is also a search tool. Every heading you can’t fill yet is a list of things to find.

When you need it

You have a question and a stack of sources, but no idea how they fit together.
You keep reading without knowing when you’ve read enough.
You need to explain your project to an adviser, a teacher or a funder.
You’ve found something that doesn’t fit, and you can’t tell whether it’s a tangent or the real story.
You’re about to start drafting and don’t know where to begin.

How to do it

1Write the working title as a question

Eco distinguishes the official title, which is usually generic, from what he calls the “secret title”: the real question the work answers, which often ends up as the subtitle. Start there. If you’ve worked through Turn a Topic into a Question, you already have it.

2Break the question into parts

Ask what a reader would need to know, in what order, to accept your answer. Each of those becomes a chapter or section. Eco suggests numbering them in a tree (1, 1.1, 1.1.1), so you can add a branch later without renumbering everything.

Eco lists what a provisional table of contents should cover: the state of the question, previous research, your hypothesis, your evidence, your analysis of it, the case for your hypothesis, and conclusions with suggestions for further research. In practice those often collapse into fewer sections; the Paper structures pages show how the parts are arranged at each level.

3Write a sentence under each heading

Eco says the outline works better as a summary, with a short description of every chapter. One sentence each is enough: what this section shows and what evidence it rests on. Writing the sentence is the test. If you can’t say what a section will show, you don’t know yet, and now you know that you don’t know.

4Mark what’s empty

Go through the outline and mark each section by what you have for it: enough sources, some, or none. The empty sections are your reading list. This turns “read more” into “find the health board’s minutes” or “find someone who has counted deaths by neighborhood.”

5Draft a provisional introduction

Eco adds one more piece: a short introduction that says what the work will show, chapter by chapter, and what limits you’ve set. He calls it fictitious, because you’ll rewrite it many times. Its job is to give your ideas a direction that won’t drift unless you deliberately restructure the outline. That stops you from following every interesting tangent.

6Revise it on purpose

When your sources tell you something the outline didn’t expect, change the outline. Add the section, merge two, move the chapter, or drop a heading that turned out to be empty for good reason. Date each version and keep the old ones. A hypothesis that never changes wasn’t tested. And once you’re drafting, the same outline keeps working: Write as you go picks up from here.

Try it

Your task

Charles Darwin outlined his theory long before he published it. In 1842 he wrote a 35-page pencil sketch, enlarged in 1844 into a longer essay, and published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Both early essays were published by his son Francis Darwin in 1909 as The Foundations of the Origin of Species. Compare the contents of the 1842 sketch with the chapter list of the 1859 first edition of the Origin. Find: (1) what kept its place; (2) what was reorganized; and (3) which subjects got chapters of their own in 1859 but had no section of their own in the sketch.

Show a hint

Both books are free on Project Gutenberg: The Foundations of the Origin of Species (eBook 22728) and the 1859 first edition of On the Origin of Species (eBook 1228). Each has a contents list near the start. Francis Darwin’s introduction compares the two structures, if you want to check your reading.

Show the answer and the path

The 1842 sketch has two parts. Part I covers variation under domestication and selection, variation in nature and natural selection, and variation in instincts. Part II covers the geological evidence, geographical distribution, affinities and classification, unity of type, abortive organs, and a recapitulation and conclusion. The Origin has fourteen chapters and no parts.

What kept its place: both open with variation under domestication, then move to variation in nature and natural selection. Both treat instinct after that. From the geological chapters on, the order is the same in both: geology, geographical distribution, affinities and classification, morphology and unity of type, rudimentary (abortive) organs, then recapitulation and conclusion.
What was reorganized: the two-part division is gone. The geological evidence, which opens Part II in 1842, becomes chapters IX and X of the Origin, after instinct and hybridism. Geographical distribution spreads over two chapters (XI and XII). Affinities, unity of type and rudimentary organs, separate sections in 1842, merge into one chapter (XIII).
New chapters in 1859: Struggle for Existence (III), Laws of Variation (V), Difficulties on Theory (VI) and Hybridism (VIII). Francis Darwin notes that hybridism, a full chapter in the Origin, had been handled inside chapter II of the 1844 essay.

What it shows: Darwin’s 1842 outline held its overall shape for seventeen years, the argument from variation through selection to the evidence. Inside that shape, sections grew, split, merged and moved as the evidence came in. Francis Darwin’s introduction also notes something missing from both early essays: the principle of divergence, which Darwin later said he had overlooked. One caution: the 1842 manuscript has almost no section titles. The section names in the 1909 edition were added by Francis Darwin to match the 1844 chapters, and he says so.

Common mistakes

Waiting until research is done to outline. By then you’ve collected material for sections that don’t exist and missed material for ones that do.
Treating the outline as a contract. It’s a hypothesis. If the evidence contradicts it, change the outline, not the evidence.
Changing it without noticing. Drift is different from revision. If the project has changed shape, update the outline and the introduction so you know it did.
Headings without sentences. A list of topics (“Background,” “Analysis”) says nothing about what you’ll show. Write the sentence.
Filling the empty sections with whatever’s handy. An empty section means “find evidence,” not “find words.”

Limits

Some research can’t be outlined far ahead. Exploratory fieldwork, open-ended interviews and early lab work can change the question itself. In that case, outline only as far as you can see, and expect the first version to be rough.

People work differently. Eco himself noted that some researchers work best on one thing at a time and others juggle many. A detailed outline suits some writers better than others. The essential part is small: a working question, the parts it breaks into, and a note of what’s still empty.

A plan can make you see only what fits. If every new source seems to confirm the outline, check whether you’re reading for support. See Confirmation bias on ThinkingCritically.net.