大纲 (dà gāng): synopsis; outline; program; leading principles

Before writing the thesis, I first made a detailed outline, marking the questions to be discussed in each chapter.

After reading my outline, the teacher suggested I swap the second and third parts to make the logic clearer.

The synopsis of this film is simple: a young man leaves his hometown, struggles in a big city for many years, and finally returns to his hometown to help the villagers become wealthy.

Before starting on the slides, he spent an afternoon organizing the outline of the report, which made the later production much faster.