The Power of Reverse Outlining

You’ve taken Anne Lamott’s sage advice and written a “shitty first draft”—a big and essential step in the development of any piece of writing. But what do you do next? How do you translate that first draft into a stronger second draft?

Consider reverse outlining. Rachel Cayley provides a clear and helpful guide to get started with this powerful technique. When I was revising my dissertation, reverse outlining enabled me to revise a chapter a week—much more quickly than I thought possible. It is the closest thing to a silver bullet I have found as a writer.

When I am reverse outlining, I have the text I am revising open in a Scrivener window on one screen and a blank document open in another Scrivener window on a second screen. If the text is a complete mess, then I follow Rachel Cayley’s instructions pretty closely. Otherwise, I work through the text paragraph by paragraph, supplying a summary sentence for each paragraph. Quite often these sentences become new topic sentences for the paragraphs in the revised text. I simply copy these new sentences over to the text and continue along. It is astonishing how quickly you can improve the clarity of your paragraphs working this way. With the point of each paragraph clearly stated, I then go back and see how those topic sentences flow in outline form. I move things around as necessary, fill any gaps, and that’s it—a big step towards Draft #2.