A Mini Outline

Some people like to do a complete outline of whatever they're going to write before they actually start writing. I don't like to do that--I like to just get down to business, although I usually have an informal outline in my head. However, sometimes I sit down to write a 1200-2000 word article and stress that I don't have enough material to fill it. What I have started doing recently is doing a quick brainstorm on the different section headings I want to cover and putting them in. Once I have that, I can see that I only need a couple hundred words (or whatever) per topic...which makes the whole thing much more palatable to approach. Give it a try!