Sample Outline

Before writing your outline you should brainstorm your idea. Here is an example:

  • Addiction: the modern spiritual malaise
  • Search for meaning perverted, experience the void of no connection
  • Types of addictions: food, shopping, drugs, eating, sex, gambling
  • Personality types and addiction
  • Reasons why people become addicted: doing instead of being
  • The cost of addiction; silence, disease, isolation
  • Success rates of rehabilitation
  • Incidence of peer pressure on addiction
  • Brain physiology, brain circuits and addiction
  • Famous 12 step programs; focus on ‘surrender’
  • Early childhood trauma and addiction
  • Addiction and the military

The list format is not the most creative style for generating idea. Better to use the handwritten circle in the middle with radiating lines emanating from its center. Most students will need to have done some reading before they can move beyond this initial brainstorming. This first step helps you focus on your main interest as well as clarify some ideas about your topic. For example, it is clear to me that I want to focus on psychological trauma and addiction. From the reading I’ve done, this appears to be the new and controversial area that psychologists and psychiatrists are discussing. Once you’ve established your main interest, and then begin to research your idea. Use meta search engines and remember to vary your key word search. In my case, I used an author’s name + addiction. GABOR MATE + ADDICTION. I found articles, book reviews and audio files of Mate being interviewed.

(this is an interview on cbc/tapestry)

(another author, not Mate)

When your reading and note taking is complete, you are ready to move to the outline phase.

Consider this as a preliminary outline as these can always be revised.

Speech Outline: The Drama of Addiction

Topic: Addiction

  1. Introduction: (address the audience at some point in the introduction)

1.1.Attention Getter:Addiction is the greatest spiritual illness of our time. OR Anyone who believes himself to be immune from the clutches of addiction is delusion.

1.2.Significance:The problem of addiction is the greatest single problem facing modern societies in both the developing and the developed world.

1.3.Thesis: Psychological traumas, such as childhood abuse and the stress of the battlefield, are the root cause of addiction and treatment programs that ignore this are doomed to failure.

1.4.Preview: The specific traumas of childhood, the common traumas of the battlefield and the collective traumas of societies where the search for meaning is replaced by the ‘need’ to consume.

1.5.Transition: Trauma is our common heritage.

  1. Body A: Traumas of childhood
  2. Incidence of physical and sexual trauma of children in developing nations (stats)
  3. Prison inmate population and correlation with childhood trauma
  4. Misunderstanding childhood trauma: projecting, narcissism, defense mechanisms
  5. Why children are silent about their trauma: authority relationship
  6. Not all traumatized children become addicts but 99% of addicts were traumatized as children
  7. How adults fail children
  1. Body B: The soldier’s trauma
  2. Post traumatic stress disorder in the military: Canadian stats
  3. The story of Romeo Dallaire: a pioneer in the field
  4. Incidence of PTSD and addiction in the military
  5. Present rehabilitation treatment strategies: the military fails
  6. Prevention of trauma: Is it possible?
  1. Body C: Alienation and trauma
  2. Definitions: Addiction, alienation and trauma
  3. Examples of ‘socially acceptable’ addictive behavior: consumerism
  4. Collective trauma and meaninglessness: a world with no purpose
  5. Consumerism replacing search for meaning: ‘retail therapy’
  6. Healing and inner transformation: look inside/spiritual work
  7. Being and not doing: meditation first, therapy next and work last.
  1. Conclusion:
  2. Anecdotes from Gabor Mate’s book: Ralph from the east side
  3. Who is immune from addiction? Recap points
  4. Traumas that become spiritual illnesses
  5. A new way to understand addiction makes effective and humane treatment possible
  6. Gracious recognition of audience’s attention