reverse outlining

Scrivener
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I’m somewhere in the end stages of a PhD dissertation and have found Scrivener helpful for this - both the software but also the basic mentality, that large piece of writing is not just larger but more complex than a small piece of writing. As I do my dissertation I’ve found that I really can’t write chapters without doing reverse outlines. I’m also surprised that no one mentioned reverse outlining to me until so far along in the dissertation (and I only heard of it from a friend who is a script writer, not someone who does academic writing.) I need to do the reverse outlines in part because of the source material I’m using for the dissertation, and because I’m often start from a shorter conference paper, a think piece I wrote for just my own use, some notes, etc, all of which shapes the piece of writing. It’s also in part because as a writer and a thinker I need to get my thinking out in words to a significant degree. That prose, though, needs a significant revision, hence the reverse outlining. I find Scrivener really helpful for this. There’s probably a better way to do this, but what I do is make each paragraph into a stand-alone unit, then write a single bullet point for each paragraph. Then I read over that list of bullet points and write a brief summary of the work. That helps me spot things that don’t work - where I need something to connect two points more fully, where the order is wrong, etc. I revise the outline accordingly then reorder the paragraphs in keeping with the new outline.

I’m curious if others do much with reverse outlining, and how you use Scrivener for it.

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I don’t actually use reverse outlining myself (other than in a cursory, haphazard, informal fashion), but we had an enquiry about it in tech support as a pre-sales enquiry by an academic user, and this is what I wrote in reply…

I have looked up “reverse outlining” to see what is involved, and my understanding is that you would want to go through your text paragraph by paragraph, identifying the actual point of each paragraph as you go. You would then make a second pass through the material, writing comments on how each paragraph advances the point it is addressing. You would then use this material to assess the coherence of individual paragraphs, the structure of the whole, the relative balance of ideas and so forth.

Obviously, this isn’t just one feature! Scrivener offers a host of features to help with this sort of work. What you would need is some sort of workflow to hook these together into a reverse outlining process. I would suggest something along the lines of this…

If the work you are reverse outlining is your own writing, make a duplicate of it and work with the duplicate for the reverse outline. The reason for this is that many of the features you will use are ones that you may also have used in creating your text, and you won’t want to lose your original thoughts, structure and metadata.

Split the text to be reverse-outlined into “chunks” of a single paragraph – very quick and easy in Scrivener – and strip out any metadata and synopsis information so that all you have is the basic text.

Then go through each chunk one at a time, giving each one a specific snappy title to identify its contents (the first step of reverse outlining). At the same time, add a description of the ideas in the paragraph to the synopsis belonging to that chunk (displayed in the Inspector). This is all very easy to do, since the binder, editor and inspector can be displayed simultaneously, so that you can see everything on the screen at once. Title on the left, in the binder… text (and title) in the middle, in the editor… synopsis on the right, in the inspector.

When you have done this for each paragraph or chunk, make a second pass through the material, assessing the content in light of its summary. At this stage, you might want to assign keywords to categorise the material, or you might want to add labels for particular topics so that you can use colour-coding in the binder to gain a visual impression of how the text is put together. You may also want to add notes to the Notes area.

To examine the reverse outline separately to the text, you would use Scrivener’s Outliner view. You can choose the data to be displayed here (title, synopsis, metadata), and can even display word counts for individual chunks (which allows you to assess the relative weight given to particular sections). Keeping the inspector open also lets you see the notes that you made in reviewing your outline (you need to select a chunk in the outliner to display its related notes in the inspector, as these will not form part of the displayed outline itself).

If the text is your own thesis, you can then go on to use other features in Scrivener to improve it. In the Corkboard view, you can see your synopses on index cards, and can move them around accordingly. Or you can drag chunks around in the binder to restructure your work. You can create folders within the text so that you can group conceptually related chunks together, and you can use chunks as “containers” for other chunks. You can use snapshots to keep a record of previous versions of individual chunks as you revise and improve them. If you are doing extensive revision of the structure, you can make backups of the project at key stages, in case you ever want to revert to a previous structure.

And then, of course, you can customise the compile process to output the reverse outline as required. Not only can you specify exactly what parts of the outline are to be output (including your notes), but you can (for example) assign hierarchical auto-numbering to help communicate the structure if the text has a hierarchical structure in your binder (or if you have created such a structure during your analysis).

Thought I’d mention it in case any of those approaches might be useful to you.

Astrid

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Thanks Astrid. I’m going to bookmark this for next time. What I’ve done in the past is basically the same over all but more haphazard in terms of using functions. I will say though, the corkboard is so helpful for moving pieces around quickly in the post-outline revisions. I can’t imagine doing this in Word.

Incidentally, I want to also add, Scrivener was a big shift in how I think about writing. I’d previously thought there was this one thing called writing, and it meant making finished written works. It wasn’t until I read stuff by you all and about Scrivener that I started to really see how there are really a lot of discrete components of writing, and different tools are appropriate to different stages. I’m finding Scapple really good for early/prewriting/note-taking stage currently.

In a way, I’d been thinking of writing as analogous to biking, a specific activity, when really writing is like sports, a set of activities with discrete variants. I could have saved a lot of headaches had I known this sooner! As I’ve been more aware of the mental gear changes involved in different parts/kinds of writing I’ve found it helpful to take breaks and to move around physically to let my mind clear from one sort of task to another. Personally I find I can move from drafting prose to outlining/reverse outlining and more structural/organizational aspects of writing fairly easily but it’s really difficult to go in the other direction. This makes me wonder if there’s any research on what’s going on in people’s brains during different parts of the writing process.

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Even biking isn’t really a single activity – time trials, versus mountain stages, versus rolling stages, versus sprint finishes… ! :smiley: And within that, there are further granulations. Very complex, very tailored to the individual requirements of the specific task at any moment in time. Quite an appropriate analogy for Scrivener.

Personally, I have used Scrivener professionally for technical writing, freelance writing and non-fiction writing of various sort… legitimately-but-without-pay for academic writing… and amateurly (if there is such a word) for creative non-fiction and fiction (I dabble as a wannabe-but-in-my-dreams novelist, as well as having a few long-term non-fiction projects which may never see the light of day). I have found Scrivener to be the perfect writing environment for me in all of those areas. I just choose those elements of Scrivener which are most useful for the way I approach the particular task in hand. Sometimes, I just open a blank project, create a new document or sixty, and write. Other times, I use all the bells and whistles so that I have a better management/creative overview of the project. I don’t even think about the distinction any more – I just use those features that strike me as being useful at any one time.

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nate, you and Astrid have raised interesting issues.

I know of no research that directly addresses this question, but I’m not an academic, just someone who keeps an eye out for information on this topic. IME the advice given by psychologists and others not just to writers but to anybody whose job it is to think, is strictly to separate the brain-storming process from the argument/narrative-forming process, and certainly that’s what applications such as Scrivener and Scapple (and to be fair, many others), and your reverse-outlining procedure (and maybe also your getting up and moving about between tasks), seem to do.

Whether this advice is based simply on what appears to work best, or on more precise studies of what’s physically happening in the brain (MRIs, brain bloodflow?), I’d be interested to know.

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Over a few years of academic writing and many years of hack professional writing I learned – “acquired” is more honest – the habit of outlining. On a rush job there might not be time for a written-down and carefully arranged outline, but even a few minutes of advance thinking has to be rated as a form of outlining.

That seems necessary, however, only when I’m dealing with “facts,” the non-fictional kind of writing: impact of KJV on Victorian poets, catalogue descriptions of pottery, report on a three-alarm fire.

When I write fiction, outlining seems not only unnecessary, but counter-productive. I plan to have A travel to B in order to take care of C. It doesn’t happen. As soon as A boards the plane he meets R who leads him to G, and in ten minutes – or two hundred words, whichever comes first – the story has changed and the careful outline is irrelevant.

Phil

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Phil, like you I’ve spent many years outlining and writing non-fiction. More recently I’ve tackled fiction. Unlike you, for fiction I’m a planner, not a pantser (for reasons of habit, speed and economy of effort - I reckon even Ann Beattie would want to know ahead of time the rough location of the rocks she’s going to step on, in order to assess whether it’s worth her while to spend time and energy trying to cross that particular stream and whether she’ll get stranded…).

But whatever suits. An interesting question for me beyond the traditional debate is whether the activities of outlining (or the exploratory first drafts of those who don’t explicitly outline) and writing to an outline (or the more definitive second or later drafts of the non-outliners) are distinctly different brain activities, using different capabilities and parts of the brain. That’s what I believe, but it would be interesting to know for sure, because if it’s true, one might be able to learn to stimulate one’s thinking in those different modes more effectively than one does at present.

H

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Hugh —

To stretch the metaphor beyond recognition (is that a metametaphor?), I see the other side and am confident in my jumping ability, although once or twice in a while I get my feet wet or have to skip back in frustration to the starting side, as evidenced by a number of unfinished and probably unfinishable mss lying about.

But to the more interesting question. A rough draft, for me, is an exploration, perhaps simply a variant form of outline. Play around with an idea until a light shines or a character begins speaking, then go wherever it leads. When that happens, race after it, E B White’s elusive bird of thought

At such times the vexatious keyboard becomes a boon, letting me write at least five times as fast as with pen and paper. Once a rough draft is done, an entirely different — what to call it? System? Mind-set? Paradigm? — takes over. Like you, I believe

How to provoke that different activity? I usually print out the rough draft and go over it by hand. (Of course this may be delusionary, but it keeps me going.) I think different modes of expression are more than technical variations, if only because of time. Carving in stone with hammer and chisel, you can contemplate each character as it’s incised; narrating into a microphone, you can — must — see farther in every direction, farther but not at all so clearly.

Highly idiosyncratic, but it’s all I have.

Phil

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I have just spent the past few years retraining in psychology, though my area of specialisation was social psychology, not neuropsychology, so I can’t offer too much illumination. However, here are a few considerations.

While it is true that certain areas of the brain seem to have very specific functions (if you sustain damage to what is commonly known as the fusiform face area, you will find it impossible to recognise faces) what strikes me is that the most essential aspect of the brain for normal human functioning is its integration. It is precisely the interconnectedness of the brain that makes it so difficult to analyse and understand. It has been estimated that each interneuron in the brain is capable of forming 10,000 connections with other nerurons, and that there are about 100 trillion synapses (connections) in the brain. The number of pathways available for impulses through the brain is therefore rather large. The problems that occur when parts of the brain are not properly interconnected may be seen in cases where so-called “split-brain” operations have been performed on patients with severe epilepsy. This rather drastic procedure involves severing the connection (the corpus callosum) between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Have a look at this video, which is about one such patient, and one of the most famous of the scientists working in the field:

youtu.be/82tlVcq6E7A

This will show that your suspicion that different parts of the brain are used for outlining and writing later drafts is false on at least one level: both the activities involve the use of language, and must, therefore, make use of Broca’s area, which is in the left hemisphere.

The video also shows the problem that comes up when it is necessary to combine language (left hemisphere) with face recognition (right hemisphere). You might like to consider what would happen if you had to imagine a face, hold that in your memory, and write a description of it. Two quite different areas of the brain are involved in this apparently simple activity, not to mention the necessary use of the hippocampus (both sides of the brain) which is what allows us to remember things. Similarly, if you had to write a description of a geographical location, you would be using two different areas of the brain: one for language and another one for space.

In short, I’m all for connectedness!

Martin