Composition Resources
Reverse Outlining
Monique Babin; Carol Burnell; Susan Pesznecker; Nicole Rosevear; and Jaime Wood
Often, outlining is recommended as an early component 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. This is a tool many writers use that is probably already familiar to you.
Reverse outlining, though, is different in a few ways. 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, 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 (this one is only looking at two paragraphs of a draft for the sake of example; yours will likely be looking at more paragraphs than just two):
| 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. |
| MAIN IDEA | HOW IT SUPPORTS THE THESIS |
| Body ¶ 1: She volunteers to fight in the games. | 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. |
| Body ¶ 2: Shooting the apple out of the pig’s mouth. | This draws more attention to her and essentially puts a target on her back that the other tributes will very mu