How do I Formally Outline?

You get the idea. Just organize your thoughts about what you are outlining and when you list a main topic, try to list every detail about it that you can.

Outlining AP History chapters sucks... I took AP World History 9 last year... each chapter takes like 4 hours to outline. FML im taking AP World History 10 this year, fml...

Yeah, I know . I did 9 hours straight of outlining 2 chapters and answering a few questions.

When studying AP US History (I did it my senior year, got a 4) you can't KNOW everything.

When you take notes, just do things simple because when you take incredibly detailed notes you won't be able to effectively use them when you need to - it'd be just like reading the book.

When you're met with acts and stuff like that, just do things really simple like this:

Act - year - brief description

Also, a REALLY good way to keep things organized is to divide the entire course into blocs. So There is the colonial period, then there is like an expeditionary period (where the US is constantly moving west, this period is also very heavy on slavery), there is the civil war, then there is reform (industrial, social, political, all sorts) then it gets into modern history.

Know when each bloc starts and ends and then when you're met with a question you can just say "Hm, *year*...that's during *bloc*, and that's predominantly *whatever* so it can assume the answer is more *trait of the bloc*."

It's like when you get to studying FDR you know he was about anti-trusts. When you get a question including him and has a reference to whether or not he passed bills dealing with trusts, you KNOW it's about breaking them up so you can easily cross off several answer choices.

I also found knowing the years that presidents came into and went out of office very helpful.