Revising Your Work Using Reverse Outlining

When you find yourself with the challenging task of having to read and analyze complex information, reverse outlining could be a helpful strategy. Reverse outlining can help you to refine your ideas into clear and concise statements. Reverse outlining is a straightforward process that can be repeated simply, and is thus an easy and useful skill to learn.
Contrary to a typical outline, which is written before you write your paper, a reverse outline is written after a draft of the paper is finished. The main goal of the reverse outline is to help you see the main ideas of your paper; this can be particularly helpful when it comes to works that need significant rewriting and/or restructuring. It can help you to see where there are gaps in your ideas, or where there are too many concepts jumbled together into one section.
In order to create a reverse outline, summarize each paragraph into one or two concise sentences. Try to be as brief as possible. If you find that you can’t write the summary in a couple of sentences, then the paragraph may be too digressive and in need of rewriting. You may also find it helpful to number each paragraph, and then write the sentence summaries on a separate piece of paper. However, you could also write your sentence summaries in the margins of your paper, if you feel that it might help you to have all your notes in one place. Whichever way you choose, make sure that you stay consistent and be thorough; be sure to summarize your entire paper following this paragraph-by-paragraph process.
Afterward, you should have a clear outline of your whole paper. Study this outline carefully and determine whether or not your paragraphs are well organized and concise, with ideas that flow smoothly and logically from one paragraph to the next. It’s best to avoid needless repetition of the same idea over and over throughout the paper. Ideally, a paper should build to a logical conclusion. Also, avoid cluttering a single paragraph with too many concepts; each paragraph should be clean and focused. Most importantly, does your paper address and build upon your topic and thesis statement? Does your paper achieve what you had set out to write?
Now that you can see your entire paper clearly using your reverse outline, it should be much easier for you to spot the problem areas. Try to think about how you will fix these issues. Are some paragraphs digressive and in need of trimming down? Perhaps, these digressive paragraphs aren’t necessary at all and could even be deleted entirely. Or maybe the structure of the paper doesn’t quite flow and the order is haphazard. In this case, it may be worth moving certain sections around. Remember that, in general, it’s best to group similar ideas into one section or even one paragraph. Try to structure your paper as logically and cohesively as possible, so that each paragraph relates to the one before it.