10.3 Revising Your Organization
It’s important to think about organization when you’re planning and drafting a piece of writing. It can help you to set goals, achieve your purpose, and stay mindful of how your readers will experience your essay. That said, you won’t finalize the organization of your essay until you revise it, hopefully after receiving feedback from your classmates and your instructor. It’s at the end of your writing process that you’ll be able to make the best decisions about how to arrange the information you want to share.
Until that time, think of the organization of your essay as provisional—as something that could be changed if necessary. For example, while writing a research paper, you may discover an important new source that you didn’t know about when you wrote the outline for your essay. You may need to reorganize in order to include this new information in the most appropriate place. Similarly, after drafting a literary interpretation essay, you may discover that you feel very differently about the literary work than you did when you first started to analyze it. You may have to reorganize your essay in order to effectively explain and support your new perspective.
This is the gray area that you must live in as a mindful writer: you have to make the best plans that you can in order to start your writing project, but you have to be prepared to change those plans, including your organization, if that will help you write a better paper. In the rest of this chapter, we describe two strategies that you can use to reconsider and possibly revise the organization of a writing project that you’re finishing up.
Reverse Outlining
We recommend outlining as an early part of the writing process, a way to organize and connect thoughts so the shape of what you are going to write is clear before you start drafting it. Reverse outlining is different. First, it happens later in the process, after a draft is completed rather than before. Second, it gives you an opportunity to review and assess the ideas and connections that are actually present in the completed draft. This is almost an opposite approach from traditional outlining, as the traditional pre-writing outline considers an initial set of ideas, which might shift as the draft is actually being written and new ideas are added or existing ones are moved, changed, or removed entirely. A reverse outline can help you improve the structure and organization of your already-written draft, letting you see where support is missing for a specific point or where ideas don’t quite connect on the page as clearly as you wanted them to.
How to Create a Reverse Outline
- At the top of a fresh sheet of paper or Word document, write the thesis or claim for the essay you are working on. This should be the thesis exactly as it appears in your draft, not the thesis you know you intended. If you can’t find the actual words, write down that you can’t find them in this draft of the paper—it’s an important note to make!
- Draw a line down the middle of the page, creating two columns below your thesis.
- Read, preferably out loud, the first body paragraph of your draft.
- In the left column, write the main idea of that paragraph (again, this should be using only the words that are actually on the page, not the ones you want to be on the page). If you find more than one main idea in a paragraph, write down all of them. If you can’t find a main idea, write that down, too.
- In the right column, state how the main idea of that paragraph supports your thesis.
- Repeat steps 3-5 for each body paragraph of your draft.
Once you have completed these steps, you have a reverse outline. It might look a little something like this:
Example
Thesis: Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of The Hunger Games, creates as much danger for herself as she faces from others over the course of the film.
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Main idea 1. She volunteers to fight in the Hunger Games
2. Shooting the apple out of the pig’s mouth
(And so on for each body paragraph)
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How it supports my thesis 1. This is the root of most of the immediate danger she finds herself in, so her directly volunteering to do it definitely helped put her in front of that danger
2. She draws more attention to herself than necessary and puts a target on her back that the other tributes will want to hit
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Working with the Results of Your Reverse Outline
So what do you do with your reverse outline? Once you make one of your own, you’ll probably already have some new observations about your paper. Often students will speak up in class after we create these to tell us that they notice places where they are repeating themselves or that some of their paragraphs have too many points or don’t clearly support the thesis.
There are a number of observations that can be made with the aid of a reverse outline, and a number of ways it can help you strengthen your paper. Try considering the following questions as you review yours.
Do Multiple Paragraphs Share the Same Main Idea? If so, you might try combining those paragraphs or at least make sure they’re right next to each other in your paper, especially if one paragraph builds on the other. You might also decide to pare back the information for that specific idea so it doesn’t feel imbalanced in how much space it takes up in the paper.
Do Any Paragraphs Have Multiple Main Ideas? Each paragraph should have only one primary focus. If you notice a paragraph does have more than one main idea, you could look for where some of those ideas might be discussed in other paragraphs and move them into a paragraph already focusing on that point, or select just the one main idea you think is most important to this paragraph and cut the other points out, or you might split that paragraph into multiple paragraphs and expand on each main idea.
Do Any Paragraphs Lack a Clear Main Idea? If it was hard for you to find the main idea of a paragraph, it will also be hard for your reader to find. For paragraphs that don’t yet have a main idea, consider whether the information in that paragraph points to a main idea that just isn’t written on the page yet. If the information does all support one main idea, adding that idea to the paragraph might be all that is needed. Alternatively, you may find that some of the ideas fit into other paragraphs to support their ideas, or you may not need some of them in the next draft at all.
Do Any Main Ideas Not Connect Clearly and Directly Back to the Thesis? Since the point of almost every paper is to support its thesis statement, this one can be critical. It should be clear how the main idea of each paragraph supports the thesis or claim of the paper. If that connection is not directly stated, ask yourself how the main idea of that paragraph furthers your thesis and then write that response.
Do Ideas Flow from Paragraph to Paragraph? Are There Gaps in Reasoning? If a paper starts out introducing something that is a problem in a community, then presents a solution to the problem, and then goes back to talking about why the problem is a problem, this organization is likely to confuse readers. Reorganizing to introduce the problem, discuss why it is a problem, and then move on to proposing a solution would help to strengthen the next draft of this paper.
Disassemble Your Paper
Disassembling your paper is another strategy that can help you to evaluate its organization. This strategy is harder to use on your own, though. For the best results, you’ll need a partner—someone who will read your essay and talk with you about it.
How to Disassemble Your Paper
- Print out a copy of your paper so that there’s only one paragraph on each page of paper. Alternatively, you can use scissors and tape to cut up your paper into single paragraphs.
- Be sure to remove page numbers or any other identifiers that would indicate the order of the paragraphs.
- Scramble the paragraphs so that they’re no longer in their correct order.
- Give the paragraphs to your reader. Your reader should read through the paragraphs and try to put them back into their correct order.
- Once your reader is done, check to see whether or not they have been able to reassemble your paper.
Working with the Results of Your Disassembled Paper
What can this activity tell you? Again, once you try it out yourself, you’ll probably see immediately where your paper is well organized and where it needs some work. Our own students are often surprised by how their classmates reassemble their papers. Many students are surprised that they have trouble reassembling their own paper!
Here are some questions that can help you make the most of this revision strategy:
Why Could Your Reader Reassemble Your Paper? If your reader was able to reassemble your paper, or at least part of your paper, ask them why. That is, what about your paper helped them to understand the organization? You can have a discussion about the clarity of your topic sentences and transition statements, or you can discuss how one idea seemed to lead logically into another. If you identify particular strengths in how some parts of your paper are organized, this can help you to strengthen the organization in all parts of your essay.
Why Couldn’t Your Reader Reassemble Your Paper? If your reader wasn’t able to reassemble your paper, or not all of it, ask them why. At what point did they get confused? Did some of your ideas or paragraphs not seem to go together? Was there a lack of topic sentences and transitions? Were the main ideas not clear or did they not seem to go logically from one to the next? Any feedback that you receive about WHY it was difficult to recreate the organization of your paper can help you to revise and improve.
Should You Consider an Alternative Organization? Whether or not your reader correctly reassembled your paper, you can talk to them about whether your current organization seems like the best one. Did you reader almost put your third paragraph in sixth position? Did they almost swap around your introduction and conclusion paragraphs? Since your paper is already in pieces, now is the time to shuffle things around to see if certain paragraphs work better in places that you hadn’t thought of.
The true value of activities like the reverse outline and disassembling your paper is that they force you to see that organization isn’t set in stone just because you have written a full draft of your paper. Organization can and should be changed during the revision process because it’s at that point that you’re able to best assess whether the content of your paper is organized in a way that your reader can understand and that best fulfills your purpose for writing.
Writing Exercise 1: Consider Your Thesis
After you review the section on “Consider Your Thesis,” examine the thesis statements below and choose one to write about. How would you organize an essay with this thesis statement? What sections of information (or paragraphs, or main ideas) would such an essay require, and what order would you arrange them in? Why?
Sample Thesis #1
Instead of ignoring barriers to easily accessible, low-cost food options, the local government could reassess tax funds and allocate some of its budget to supporting food pantries, increasing access to food assistance programs, and it could increase efforts to improve employment options for the unemployed.
Sample Thesis #2
While some areas of the country excel at equitable accessibility to quality higher education, widespread issues including income inequality, racial discrimination, and underfunded institutions prevent many minorities and those in poverty from attending college.
Sample Thesis #3
This essay argues that fracking is harmful to the environment because it can destroy natural habitats, cause earthquakes, and because it can increase methane and other greenhouse gas emissions.
Writing Exercise 2: Consider Common Patterns of Organization
Now that you know what some of the common organization patterns are in academic writing, you can look for them when you’re reading published essays in this class or others. You can notice where professional writers use or combine organizational patterns, and then you can use what you find to inspire you in your own writing.
For this exercise, choose an essay that you have read for this class and review it, thinking primarily about how it is organized. What pattern (or patterns) of organization does the writer use to organize the essay? How do you know? Create a reverse outline that maps the pattern(s) that you see.
Creative Commons Attributions
This chapter was edited by Justin Sevenker. It contains material from “So You’ve Got a Writing Assignment. Now What?” by Corrine E. Hinton in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1; “Organizing Your Writing” in Successful Writing by Scott McLean; “Patterns of Organization and Methods of Development” in The Word on College Reading and Writing by Monique Babin, Carol Burnell, Susan Prsznecker, Nicole Rosevear, and Jamie Wood; and “The Writing Process” by Kathy Boylan in Let’s Get Writing!, all of which are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
