Reverse Outlining - Writers Check This Out

 I recognized the idea when I started reading Reverse Outlining: Improve Your Draft’s Structure and Clarity (Grammarly.com), but never thought of it as a formal thing to do.

Even when a draft feels solid, reverse outlining is a powerful way to improve it. It helps you step back, evaluate the draft’s structure, and make sure every paragraph fits together to move your ideas forward. In contrast to outlining before writing, reverse outlining happens after the draft is complete. You read through your work, summarize each paragraph, and use those summaries to evaluate whether your ideas flow logically.

Reverse outlining fits naturally into the writing process as part of the revision stage. It is especially useful after completing your rough draft but before deeper rewriting. Through reverse outlining, you can take an objective look at your structure and revise it with intention.

I was doing something like this with Novel Writer until I moved to the new computer (and need to really read the manual again). There have been several rejections lately which mention problems of pacing in my short stories. I relate pacing to plot, which is mostly in my head, and the solution seemed to be getting the story where I could see its whole. I also have this problem where I get dug in so hard on the writing - the trees - that I do not see the forest. The more I read, the more it seemed to moving along the same direction I meant to go with Novel Writer (without re-reading the manual)

A reverse outline is an outline you create from a completed draft. Instead of mapping ideas before writing, you work backward: Read each paragraph, identify its main idea, and list those ideas as outline bullets. This makes it easy to evaluate your writing’s structure, logic, transitions, and how effectively each section supports your thesis. 

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The key benefits of reverse outlining include:

• Clarifying structure by showing whether paragraphs appear in a logical order
• Improving flow by revealing where transitions are weak or missing
• Refining focus by showing whether each paragraph supports your thesis
• Strengthening your argument by showing where evidence or explanations can be expanded
• Simplifying the revision process by breaking large drafts into manageable parts

But this still seems a lot of work, and about the same time I came across the following:

Reverse outlining is especially valuable for essays, long reports, research writing, and personal narratives, where clarity and cohesion matter. It’s far from the only type of outline available to you, and it works best when combined with at least one other outlining strategy.

 Looks like I need to find the time to re-read Novel Writer's manual, and this might be a solution to the problems with my short stories (my dour content feeds a host of other problems).

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