Writing & Grammar Workshop: The Reverse Outline

by Jennie Ruby

Essays, narratives, introductions, reviews and opinion pieces can benefit from reverse outlining. In a reverse outline, you take your first draft and label its parts. Every paragraph gets a label summarizing its main idea, or at least its first idea. You can write these labels in the margin of a printout, in a separate screen, or on a piece of paper. Once you have identified the first topic of a paragraph, check the rest of the paragraph to make sure it sticks to its topic. If a new topic or idea surfaces, write an additional label.

Once every paragraph is labeled, the labels constitute your reverse outline. You have derived from your writing the original order of your thoughts. Now you can examine the order and decide which thoughts go together, which thoughts are subtopics of the others, and whether you need to change the order.

At this stage, I like to type the labels into Microsoft Word or into specialized outlining software so I can drag and drop the labels until I am satisfied with their order and hierarchy.

Once you have settled on your new outline, you are faced with getting your old draft into the new order. Here is where technology can help.

First, get your outline into your word processor. If you have organized your outline with arrows and numbers on paper, type it in. If you have used outlining software, such as Mindjet's MindManager, export your outline to Word.

With the new outline in a new document, and your draft text in your original document, set up your screen so you can see both documents at once. If you are using Word, you can use the View Side by Side tool to view the two documents at the same time. Turn off the Synchronous Scrolling function. Now you can drag and drop (or cut and paste) each sentence or paragraph from your old draft into its proper place in your new outline.

I do recommend dragging or cutting the text from the old document, and not copying, because I once copied the same sentence into two different locations and was at risk of giving my readers déjà vu.

Once you have dragged or copied all the text from the original draft, close the original without saving and your draft will be preserved in its original state.

Your new draft will no doubt need some work to smooth over transitions between ideas in their new locations, but once that is done you can be confident that you have a well-organized document.

***