85 Reverse Outlining
This process is what it sounds like: outlining in reverse. That is, after writing (not before), you will outline the structure of your draft. For initial or prewriting outlines, you create them early in the writing process to organize ideas and set up your structure. Outlines are plans. With reverse outlining, you take a written draft and break it down into sections or parts, identifying main parts and key moves. Your goal is to find out if the structure functions in the way you intended it to function. Did you stick to the original plan or outline? Did you digress or take some new directions? Reverse outlining can help you visualize what you did and then decide if more changes need to be made.
When reverse outlining, there isn’t a right or a wrong way to go about it, but you might consider two different approaches that follow below. In the embedded video, you’ll see how a writer can extract information from their paper to create an outline that closely mirrors the standard outline format. In the activity and visual example that comes after the video, you can see how one author uses a two-column approach to reverse outlining.
How to Create a Reverse Outline
- At the top of a fresh sheet of paper, write your primary thesis or claim for the text you want to outline. 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 single 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 the thesis.
- Repeat steps 3-5 for each body paragraph of the draft.
Once you have completed these steps, you have a reverse outline! It might look a little something like this example, which reverse outlines two paragraphs of a draft; your reverse outline will likely be looking at more paragraphs than just two.
Attributions
“Reverse outlining,” M. Babin et al., The Word on College Reading and Writing, , CC-BY-NC 4.0 International, https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/wrd/chapter/reverse-outlining/.
“Reverse Outlines” from UNC Chapel Hill Writing Center.