I’m not a big fan of outlines as a drafting tool. I wrote them in high school and again in my first-year advanced writing course in college, both times under duress.
When I say “outlines,” I’m not thinking of the short jottings students write in the margins of a bluebook to organize their thoughts before an essay test. Those serve the valuable purpose of keeping the brain on track in a time-sensitive situation. No, the kind I hate are sentence outlines, the paramour of many English teachers in the 1980s, who required student writers to plan in excruciating detail the topic sentence for each paragraph of their essay.
I believe the teachers who assigned those outlines did so in good faith. I bet they thought that if my classmates and I knewthe topic sentence of each paragraph in advance, we’d have an easier time writing the rest of the paper. But I found those sentence outlines stultifying. They turned the act of writing into drudgery where I dutifully wrote a little bit more about what I’d said my main ideas were. The process was made more excruciating by teachers who refused to let us change our outlines while we were writing. No pursuit of new ideas = no delight.
My rejection of outlines comes chiefly from this miserable adolescent experience with them but also from composition scholarship that says the act of writing is itself generative. When we write, we don’t simply flesh out ideas that were wholly formed in advance: The act of writing creates new ideas and can take us far away from where we thought our thoughts would take us. When we write, we learn what we think.
So, yeah, I loathe sentence outlines. But there’s another sort of outline I do appreciate: the reverse outline. It’s based on the premise that an outline is easier to write, and more useful, after your draft is complete.
How does it work? Imagine you’ve completed a vomit draft, a first draft where you just spit all of your ideas onto the page, not caring whether the sentences are complete or the punctuation is correct, not thinking at all about style. You’ve got loads of ideas here, but you’re a little woozy from dropping all that stuff on the page really quickly, and you’re not sure how the ideas fit together and whether they’re ordered in a way that makes any real sense.
This is a great time for a reverse outline. Go through the essay, summarizing the main idea of each paragraph in the margin. If a paragraph seems to have more than one main idea, write both down. (You’ll come back to this.) When you get to the end of the paper, go back to the beginning and read your paragraph summaries.
This is where you’ll be able to tell how your ideas are progressing. If you feel a bit of a leap between paragraphs, so will your reader. Maybe you’ll just need more of a transition there, or maybe those paragraphs are too unrelated to be so close to each other. Having summaries of all your paragraphs allows you to see those gaps and misalignments, so you can move paragraphs around to create a more logical progression. And those paragraphs where you have more than one idea? Those are an opportunity. Break them up and develop your thinking about each topic more fully.
My other favorite time to apply the reverse outline technique is when I’m so deep into revising that I’ve lost track of which point I’m trying to develop. For me, this usually goes something like this: I’m writing along, developing one point, and then suddenly it becomes apparent that the point isn’t really clear unless I explain something else for a while, and that leads me to a really cool rethinking of something I said earlier, which now I need to comment on, and wow, doesn’t the framing I gave this paragraph make it seem like I should be developing another idea too…Sound familiar? This is one example of what scholars mean when they say writing is generative, and if you’re having this experience, you may want to get to the end of this section and start to reverse outline.