Outline What You Actually Wrote

Practice. Summarize every existing section in one sentence, in the order they appear, each with a verb of function, allowing an hour for a chapter. Do not fix anything. Put the list aside for a few hours or a night, then read it aloud from top to bottom, listening for the place where you stop believing the sequence, and mark it. Then ask only one question of the list as a whole: if a stranger saw only these sentences, what book would they think I had written? The answer may be a different book from the one you meant. Sometimes you will prefer it, and then the list is your revision plan.

A doctoral student, a composite, has a nine-thousand-word chapter that everyone says is “almost there” and that feels off to her in a way she cannot name. She makes a list, one line per paragraph, in order, recording what each paragraph does. Four consecutive paragraphs make the same point with different examples. The paragraph that states the chapter’s real argument is number eleven. Two paragraphs refer to a concept that is not introduced until paragraph nineteen.

Her list is a reverse outline, the plan made backward. The UNC Writing Center’s guidance on reorganizing drafts describes it for academic writing: read the draft, make very brief notes about what each paragraph is trying to accomplish, transfer them in order to a fresh sheet, and so make, in the Center’s words, “an outline of what is actually in your paper, rather than what you intended to have in it or think should be in it,” and then examine it. Among the things the Center says it can reveal are gaps in reasoning, unnecessary repetition, places that need transitions, and whether ideas are presented in a logical order.

The verb does the work. A line reading “discusses the economy” summarizes the topic and learns nothing. A line reading “introduces the economy as the first of three causes,” or “repeats the point of paragraph four,” or “answers the objection raised in paragraph six,” says what the unit does. The method probably works because you tend to believe your own intentions: if you know what a chapter is supposed to do, you read it as doing that, and the reverse outline replaces memory of intent with a record of function.

The tool is for a draft with enough material to have a shape. Made too early, on a half-finished draft, an outline can freeze the draft into premature shape.