The final step is to pay attention to the way your new paragraphs work. Step 7: Check for topic sentences and cohesion The time for massaging everything into a cohesive whole will come, but for now you must trust that the new outline has allowed you to devise a new and improved configuration of your text.
If you take a few paragraphs from the second half of a paper, for instance, and move them up to an earlier section, they can’t possibly sit right. The result, at this point, can be pretty rough. Practically, what you do here is move the text around to reflect the organization of the new outline. At this point, you need faith, faith in the new outline and faith in your ability to transform your text into something better. That hold comes from the legitimate fear that you might take away existing coherence and flow without being able to replace it with something better. That initial draft-even with all the flaws that you’ve just uncovered-will generally have a real hold on you. And unless you are an incredibly confident writer, you will find this scary. Now it’s time to use this new outline to transform the text. In steps 3, 4, and 5, you’ve been working with the outline. Step 6: Reorganize the text according to the revised outline You have the best of both worlds at this point: you know a great deal that you didn’t know before you started writing, but you are still working at a level of abstraction that will keep you from getting bogged down in the details. Now that you can see all the topics and can start to see possible weaknesses in either your ordering of points or your allocation of space, you are ready to create a better outline for the text. This step is the bridge between noting what you have and preparing to create something new.ĭuring steps 3 and 4, you’ve been working with a list of topics in step 5, you will have to transform that list into a genuine outline. Understanding the proportionality involves observing how much space is being devoted to each element. Understanding the logic involves observing the way elements have been placed in relation to one another. The next step is to analyze this outline, paying particular attention to the logic and proportionality of your internal organization. The crucial thing at this stage is to leave your original text alone and work just on the outline you are trying to keep yourself away from the muddling effect of the detailed content in your own writing. As an advocate for your future reader, you are trying to see past the detail and look just at essential structure. To create this preliminary outline, you are doing nothing more than listing the topics that you’ve identified, paragraph by paragraph. Step 3: Arrange these topics into an outline Does the paragraph have a topic sentence? Yes or no? And how long is the paragraph? The latter can be recorded in word count or in more qualitative terms as short, average, or long. Again, at this stage, you are observing rather than judging or remedying. Once you’ve done that, you can observe whether topic sentences can be found and make a note of paragraph length. You are simply noting what each paragraph was trying to do, for better or worse. When doing a reverse outline, it is crucial to remember that you are trying to make evident what is there rather than what ought to be there. Since you are looking at an early draft, this process will be challenging: not all paragraphs will have topics and not all topics will be expressed neatly in a single paragraph. Once the paragraphs have been numbered, try to identify a topic in each one. Step 2: Identify the topic of each paragraph The simple act of directing our attention towards paragraphs-and thus away from sentences-can be helpful: while writers naturally focus on sentences, we must always remember that our readers are naturally inclined to focus on paragraphs. The basic unit of a reverse outline is the paragraph, so the first step is to number the paragraphs. Reorganize the text according to the revised outline The steps to creating a reverse outline are simple: 1 A reverse outline will reveal the structure-and thus the structural problems-of a text. Regardless of whether or not you create an outline before you write, creating one after you have written a first draft can be invaluable. Simply stated, a reverse outline is an outline that we create from an existing text rather than turning an outline into a text, we are turning a text into an outline. My favourite revision strategy is the reverse outline.
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