Reverse Outlining with Topic Sentences

An outline is an essay condensed into a list of its topics in the order they appear in the paper. On the other hand, a reverse outline is when an author reads over a draft and identifies just what it is they are saying. Reverse Outlining helps you see just what it is that you wrote.

Putting together a reverse outline can be an interesting experience. We can see how our ideas actually came out, how they changed, and even how our perception on our topic changed as we wrote. Or, we can miss the point and end up just seeing what we want to see in our drafts, as opposed to what’s really there.

Let me elaborate. You did your outline and it went well. You wrote a draft and it went well. But when you go to do your reverse outline, you know what you wanted to say in each paragraph, and so rather than writing what your essay says, you write down what you want it to say. This is only going to cause problems. Instead, I recommend trying the following when reverse outlining:

1. Identify the topic sentence in a paragraph. Look for the sentence in the paragraph that best explains what the paragraph is doing: which could work as a paraphrase of the paragraph. You may be surprised to find that this is not always the first sentence; it may come in the middle or the end, and you may find the paragraph ended up addressing a different topic than you had anticipated. No matter where it is, copy this sentence into your outline as is.
2. Reread the paragraph for tangential sentences. I'm not talking about tangents from the essay thesis: I mean tangents from the paragraph's topic sentence. It is when a paragraph does things or addresses issues we didn't originally expect, but these things still may be relevant to the essay as a whole. Take the sentences that best represents the shift or tangent and make it a subtopic of the paragraph's topic on the outline.
3. Repeat until the essay is done. Do this process for each and every paragraph. Don't fret too much over the essay thesis, but focus on identifying the sentences that mark changes in topic throughout the essay and within paragraphs.
4. Revise. If you've done it right, you've just identified topic consistency issues in your essay, which will help you go back and make the necessary changes. This may be as simple as revising the topic sentence to accommodate a concept introduced in the paragraph, or it could require hefty revisions.

I recently did this with an essay of mine, and while most of my paragraphs were fine, a few introduced tangents. I had to use a variety of strategies to fix these issues. Almost all of them required some revision to the topic sentence, and while a couple didn't need anything else (to resolve the tangent), most needed more attention. I had rewritten sentences, and deleted some unnecessary words.

Thankfully, though, no paragraphs had more than one tangent. With one exception.

After I identified the topic sentence of one paragraph, I identified four tangents.

Four. An essay as a whole shouldn't have any. I had a paragraph with four. I identified the issues, so that as I moved to the next draft, I could outline properly and make the necessary changes. But had I never taken these measures, I probably never would have found and fixed these tangents, and would have only made the matter worse when doing normal revisions. I probably would have encountered this paragraph and would have known there were problems, but without identifying the topic sentence and tangents, the issue would have remained muddled and my attempts to mend it would have just made it more confusing.

The main lesson to be learned from this is outlining is more than just summarizing what a paragraph says or what you want it to say. Readers don't have the luxury of knowing what you're thinking. They have to go off of what you have written. So, make sure what you give readers is clear and coherent, from sentences, to topics and paragraphs, to the thesis.