It blows mine, too. I remember having to do the outlines and hating it, but it really helps you understand the structure of an essay even if you never write that way again.

I think outlining will actually become an important tool with generative AI. For example, I used it to generate a letter of recommendation last week. So to do that, I had to:

• Write a prompt with enough background for the AI to work with, and include all my talking points
• Generate the output
• Read over everything to make sure what it generated was relevant and accurate
• Edit the draft to reflect my voice, add a sentence or two to emphasize things I wanted to stand out, remove some of the fluff, etc.

It still turned what was probably an hour’s worth of work into 15 minutes, but at least currently you need to understand what you’re doing to use it this way. Specifically, knowing how to outline made it easy to write a concise yet detailed prompt so I could generate what I wanted on the first try.