Category Archives: Revision

Posts that discuss strategies for revision

Style Sheets

Posted on February 22, 2023 | 1 comment

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I’ve spent the last few years working on a book about graduate writing. That process is now drawing to a close: Thriving as a Graduate Writer will be published in June! Between now and then, I’m going to use this space to share brief excerpts. In addition to my discussion of principles, strategies, and habits for effective academic writing, the book has short ‘asides’ that allowed me to engage with topics outside that main narrative. Over the next four months, I’ll share my favourites of those asides. As always, I’d love to hear what you think!

Book Cover showing title: Thriving as a Graduate Writer
Style Sheets

As early in the drafting process as you can manage, I always recommend creating a document-specific style sheet. A style sheet is nothing more than a record of your decisions, created for the purpose of maximal consistency. The easiest way to create a style sheet is to pay attention to the decisions you make as you go along and then record them. You may have thought that a choice was obvious or that an issue was inconsequential; no matter, if you had to pause to make a writing-related decision, record it in your style sheet. This process will be different for each writer and each project. If you are writing a thesis, you may be working from a provided template that will mercifully cut down on formatting decisions. If you are using a citation manager, you may be spared too much worry about citation formatting. But you will still make a great many decisions as you write, so why not increase efficiency by making those decisions only once? One reason that we fail to take this simple step is that we imagine—at that moment of decision—that we will remember our decision. In fact, we often remember having decided without being able to remember what that decision actually was. Did you choose pre-modern, Premodern, or premodern? Do you use future or present tense for prospective signposting? Do you put the punctuation inside or outside the quotation marks? Do you indent the first line of a paragraph or add an additional space? At what point do you stop spelling out numbers and present them as numerals? Did your abbreviation include the plural, or will you make the abbreviation plural as needed? Are you using the serial comma? Do you know what terms in your field are capitalized or italicized? To answer some of these questions may require consulting resources—such as your disciplinary style guide—but you want to avoid checking those cumbersome resources repeatedly. Instead, once you have resolved an issue, put it in your style sheet. Your future self will thank you.

Thriving as a Graduate Writer will be available in early June from the University of Michigan Press. To pre-order your copy, visit the book page. Order online and save 30% with discount code UMS23!

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Available for Revision

Posted on March 2, 2022 | 1 comment

Revision is a frequent topic on this blog: how it is foundational to the academic writing process; how it so easily gets neglected; how it can be organized into a systematic process. But I haven’t talked much about how revision is connected to decisions about technological platforms and formatting. Revision is, of course, a conceptual activity, but it is also a physical activity. When we revise, we aren’t just thinking about the ideas contained in our text, we are engaging with the physical manifestation of those ideas: words and sentences and paragraphs laid out on pages. That layout–how our text looks–makes a difference to our revision process. Needless to say, every type of technology leads to its own revision workflow. There’s no need for nostalgia for any particular technologies, for handwriting, typewriting, actual carbon copies, carets, or whiteout. It is crucial, however, to look at the cycle of revision that is afforded by your current technology and make sure that it supports an optimal revision process.

To start, I want to reinforce the importance of physical engagement with your text. How are you manifesting your concerns and clarifications as you revise? On screen, you can annotate with the tools available in your writing platform. In hard copy, you can underline or highlight to emphasize what you want to focus on. If necessary, you can even simulate annotation with your voice. When reading aloud, you can direct your attention to a particular aspect or pattern; basically, you are using your voice to mimic annotation when you aren’t able to mark up your writing. Revision ultimately requires all of us to change the manner of our interaction with our texts, from passive reading to active engagement. The kinesthetic act of highlighting the patterns in your own writing–using cursor, pen, or voice–can help to shake up your familiarity with text that you are seeking to improve. 

In order to allow that engagement to happen, however, we need to have formatted our text in such a way that we are able to see it as ‘available’ for revision. Writers can easily short-circuit revision by moving too quickly to something that looks finished. A text must look recognizably like a draft, so your brain can see it as ready for revision. I often switch to a ‘light’ version of my writing font when revising because that looks noticeably unfinished to me. Obviously, ‘looking like a draft’ is a relative concept; it has to look like a draft to you. In general, I recommend being wary of features that allow you to turn an early draft into something that looks like a final draft; I often see student writing that is still very rough but is dressed up to look more finished than it actually is. Some writers feel empowered by creating something that looks more polished–it makes them feel like a finished text is within reach–but I think the downsides are significant. Revision is hard enough without sending our brains mixed signals. 

Once you have committed to tactile engagement with your text and have created visual cues to reinforce the need to revise, a question still remains: Will you be revising on a screen or on a hard copy? I’m frequently asked about the relative merits of the two, but it’s a question without a definitive answer. Some people need to revise on paper; others can manage the full writing-revision process electronically. Again, the important issue is whether your choice supports the act of revision. Working in hard copy is inherently disruptive; we are no longer able to interact with our text in the way we were during the composition process. Instead, our textual interventions become limited to those we can manage with a pen. The advantage of working in hard copy is the way that it prevents an unwanted blurring of writing and revision. By looking at your words on the page, you are forced to think about how you wish to alter them, rather than just doing it. While ‘just doing it’ might sound more efficient, that approach makes it hard to bring your attention to issues beyond the local. In order to think about the text more broadly–possibly by doing a reverse outline–you need the ability to evaluate the full text without immediately altering it. 

While revising on paper may facilitate the ability to see the text anew, many of you prefer to work on screen. The reasons for this may be practical; hard copies may feel wasteful, or printing may be inaccessible. Or the reason could be more substantive; working on screen may feel so natural that it has become essential to your ability to engage with your text. But if staying online is hampering your ability to do substantial revision, the changes in formatting that we’ve been discussing here might help. Before revising, you can change the font to one that signals your commitment to revision. Or you can change the layout on the screen. You can even turn your text temporarily into a PDF and make your annotations on screen that way. Revision requires extra discipline when being done online. We can so easily be distracted by our ability to tinker; reading in an evaluative manner can absolutely be done online, but doing so requires interventions to boost our good intentions. Since willpower is often insufficient to keep us on task, using formatting to create tangible reminders to revise can be invaluable.

In sum, maintaining a physical engagement with text during revision is challenging because we so easily lapse into a simpler–and speedier–form of reading. In order to resist that tendency, whether you are working online or on paper, you need to use formatting to remind yourself that your writing is, in fact, available for revision.

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Marking Up Your Text

Posted on March 23, 2017 | 4 comments

The most popular post on this blog is consistently the one on reverse outlines. I’m sure this popularity is driven by the fact that reverse outlining is a powerful act of regaining control over a text. This renewed sense of control comes in part from the way that a reverse outline encourages us to mark up a text. There can be something so powerless about reading a text that we know to be flawed; as we move through the pages, we can end up mesmerized or demoralized rather than energized. This passivity can then impede our ability to revise since, needless to say, revision is essentially active. Doing a reverse outline can give us a sense of agency because we have to overcome our passivity in favour of actively marking up a text. In this post, I would like to discuss two other examples of gaining insight through marking up our texts: using highlighting to foreground proportionality with a text and using annotation to clarify the internal dynamic within sentences.

If you want to see what you are spending time on in your text, it can be very useful to make those allocations visible through highlighting. This addition of colour to your text will show you what you are up to and may even make you happy—academic writing feels way more fun when it has colours. You begin by deciding what you want to look for and then you mark up the text with a range of colours to make those findings visible. Generally, I advocate doing this when there is a question about whether we’re devoting the right amount of space to the right tasks. The two issues that I most often recommend tackling with this strategy are an insufficient focus on scholarly contribution and a reticence about using metadiscourse.

When introducing a research project, graduate writers often struggle to devote enough time to the elaboration of their own contribution. Instead, they spend a lot of time on the background context and supporting literature before turning quickly to their research plans; this quick transition often means that the underlying problem and its significance are under-explained. Taking an introduction and highlighting its different elements can show us how we are ‘spending our text’. When we highlight a text using the context-problem-response framework, we can see if we’ve given enough room to the elaboration of our problem and its significance. The goal is not parity, of course, but sufficiency: Have I said enough? Highlighting an introduction in this fashion also makes evident a common tendency in early drafts: saying the same thing in multiple ways. It can be very useful to say things in variant ways; doing so can be a crucial way to figure out what we want to say. And there are definitely species of repetition that fulfill important functions for the reader. But when the repetition is caused by the writer not yet knowing how they want to frame an issue—and thus coming at it in various ways—highlighting can help us see that dynamic and then move towards a more consistent message.

Another way we can use highlighting is to check to see if enough metadiscourse has been used. How much metadiscourse is ‘enough’ is obviously a legitimate question that can’t be answered in the abstract. However, it is always desirable to see how visible we as authors are in our own text, whether we are looking to become more or perhaps less visible. Being able to see our authorial presence in the text—by highlighting the various places where we crop up—allows us to make an informed decision about whether that presence is as it should be.

As we’ve just seen, highlighting is a way of marking up a text to illuminate broad tendencies in our writing. In other instances, we may wish to mark up a text to uncover what is going on with particular sentences. When a sentence has a lot of moving parts, we often struggle to manage its internal workings; by using some form of mark-up, we can lay bare those workings. I will use colour to demonstrate this here, but underlining (or italicizing or bolding) can work just as well. Consider this example:

Original: A coalition of developing countries prevented implementation of the World Bank plans to relocate ‘dirty industries’ to lower-income countries and to resist efforts to turn underdeveloped countries into a dump for toxic waste from the developed world.

Was the writer trying to say that the coalition prevented plans to relocate and to resist? That’s what the parallelism appears to suggest:

A coalition of developing countries prevented implementation of the World Bank plans to relocate ‘dirty industries’ to lower-income countries and to resist efforts to turn underdeveloped countries into a dump for toxic waste from the developed world.

But that reading makes the sentence incoherent: the two plans would stand in direct opposition to one another. It seems more likely that the writer wanted to say that the coalition prevented implementation and resisted efforts. That’s not what the original says, but that appears to be what it means.

A coalition of developing countries prevented implementation of the World Bank plans to relocate ‘dirty industries’ to lower-income countries and to resist efforts to turn underdeveloped countries into a dump for toxic waste from the developed world.

This version allows us to see that we need to change the form of the second verb (to resist) to parallel the first (prevented):

Revision: A coalition of developing countries prevented implementation of the World Bank plans to relocate ‘dirty industries’ to lower-income countries and resisted efforts to turn underdeveloped countries into a dump for toxic waste from the developed world.

The writer of this original sentence needed a strategy to help clarify its internal workings. By annotating the sentence, they would be able to see where it went wrong. Not all sentences deserve this level of attention, of course, but this practice can allow us to diagnose confusing choices in complex sentences. A variant of this strategy can also be used when reading aloud: we can use intonation to make sentence patterns evident to ourselves. But reading aloud generally only helps us to establish whether the sentence is working; once we hear that it isn’t working, we will often need to mark up the sentence to sort out exactly what has gone wrong.

When you are thinking about how you might use these strategies, it’s worth considering the difference between marking up on a screen and on a hard copy. My inclination is always to do them on paper: I love the feeling of stepping away from the computer and getting a pen—or a highlighter—in my hand. But that is a description not a recommendation. For me, a pen in hand leads to a particular sense of efficacy. And efficacy is the key here; these strategies are meant to put you back in charge of your text. Whatever places you in the driver’s seat is good. For some, that will mean working with pen and paper; for others, the digital setting is so natural that staying there will make more sense. I think working on paper—regardless of your inclination—is worth considering simply because it is noticeably different than working on-screen. Ultimately, however, it comes down to personal experience: choose the mode of revision that allows you to see your own text clearly and that gives you the efficacy to make the necessary changes.

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Revising Out Loud

Posted on January 20, 2016 | 3 comments

This past fall, I accidentally published a very rough draft of a post. I still don’t know how I managed to hit Publish instead of Save Draft, but I did. The post was so rough that I hadn’t even decided whether or not I wanted to publish it; I often use this space just to think through issues that are on my mind. After my initial horror subsided, I found the reader reaction interesting. Lots of people said that they were actually glad to see a provisional version of someone else’s writing. I’ve certainly talked here about how rarely we see other people’s weak drafts and have often wondered how best to combat this problem. Mistakenly posting a work in progress is certainly one way to show the world how muddled my thinking and syntax can be. I decided there must be some way to build on this accidental overshare, but I wasn’t immediately sure how best to do so.

As I pondered this question, I realized that my revision process has two phases. I often talk about the relatively simple fact that we ought to tackle some aspects of revision before others, but here I’m getting at something different. Before we can begin these sequenced stages of revision, we may need to confront our own ambivalence about what we’ve written. This preliminary phase—which I will talk about this post—is the hard one for me. The second phase is the fun one because it involves fixing something that I know I want to share. The hard part is deciding whether something is worth sharing and whether it can be revised into publishable form. This stage is harder because it is less about technique and more about self-doubt. My litany of self-doubting questions are likely familiar to many of you. Am I saying anything interesting? Is what I’m saying even right? Has someone else already said it better? Might I be inadvertently offending someone? Could I be unnecessarily complicating the issue? Have I contradicted myself? You get the idea. In the rest of this post, I want to talk about the process of responding to such early questions in a way that allows me to make an initial commitment to my own writing. In order to get to the point at which I’m ready to make the necessary revisions, I need to assess three aspects of an early draft: relevance; coherence; and manageability.

Assessment of relevance: The first revision decision is whether I want to share something at all. As I often say here on the blog, some things need to be written more than they need to be read, and I have lots of those in my unpublished drafts folder. To decide whether to publish something on the blog, I need to think about the relevance of the topic to my anticipated audience. In this case, the key point was that presentation slides benefit from being designed rather than written. Was that worth talking about? Since I see such a large number of slides decks that are full of text while being hard for the audience to follow, I decided that these reflections were relevant. By making this decision early, I try to avoid the inefficiency that can result from being noncommittal about my own writing.

Assessment of coherence: Once I establish that I want to keep a post, I have to assess its coherence. To do this, I turn to a reverse outline. Obviously, a reverse outline isn’t nearly as important for a short text as for a long one, but it can still be helpful. Identifying the basic point of each paragraph confirms whether I’ve been able to sustain my attention to a topic and allows me to see whether each of the paragraphs makes a distinct contribution.

Assessment of manageability: Finally, I find it valuable to create a manageable path to completion. It can, of course, be hard to decide how much revision is necessary: finished is not an objective state. Because revision can so easily become a self-perpetuating activity, I like to make a clear plan. This planning doesn’t necessarily stop me from late-stage tinkering, of which I do far more than I should, but it does make it harder for me to indulge my tendency towards endless revision. Knowing that revision ultimately has diminishing returns, I like to make an explicit plan based on revision priorities and available time.

Taken together, these different assessments give me a meaningful way of managing my own discontent. As is not uncommon, my early writing efforts often fill me with dismay. It is important, however, to have a concrete way to move past such feelings of inadequacy. It can be helpful to realize that others are also struggling, but that alone won’t enhance the quality of our texts. To improve our writing, we need a way of channelling any unhappiness. By asking myself these questions, I am trying to be deliberately hard on myself without succumbing to the negativity that results from being indiscriminately hard on myself. There is some discipline required here: I allow myself to be very critical on the condition that I will accept what I come up with when I address the criticisms. In other words, I can’t just continue to find new problems.

Once I’ve finished these initial assessments, I have to do the actual revisions. As I said above, this part I love. Figuring out what a sentence (or paragraph) is trying to do and then figuring out what is getting in its way is a lot of fun. While I often lack confidence in the things I’m trying to say, I sometimes feel real pleasure in my ability to make my sentences and paragraphs do as I wish. I’ll try to do a post in the future that looks in detail at that sort of sentence and paragraph transformation. In the meantime, I’d love to hear other people’s strategies for getting comfortable with their own early drafts.

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The Craft of Revision

Posted on December 18, 2014 | 13 comments

All academic writers have some sort of revision process, but that process is often either insufficient (just nibbling around the edges) or scattershot (catching some things but missing others). To improve our revision practices, we generally have to both deepen them and make them more systematic.

My starting point here is the near impossibility of crafting reader-ready first drafts. If the material is conceptually complex, if you are still struggling to understand the implications of what you’ve learned, if the internal connections aren’t yet apparent to you, then the first draft is going to be clumsy. At that stage, the text will be something that you are still learning from rather than something that others can learn from. For most of us, making the transition from a text that helps you to a text that helps the reader takes multiple iterations. When I talk about needing to make a commitment to extensive revision, that choice of words might make it sound as if the main issue is one of will power. The truth is that developing good revision practices takes more than just commitment because revision itself is very challenging. Even with the best of intentions, we still run into problems:

“I always run out of time.”

In other words, “I’m not actually getting a first draft done early enough to make revision a rational part of my writing process; at the last minute, I’m trying to make it better, but I don’t actually have the time or space to tackle the hard stuff.”

“I try to edit, but then I get distracted by content.”

In other words, “Even if I have the time and space for editing, I quickly shift my focus away from the writing to issues of content.”

“I see some problems but not others.”

In other words, “Even with the best of intention, with sufficient time, with sufficient attention to matters of expression (rather than content), I still can’t see all the problems in my own text.”

As these comments demonstrate, the ability to revise our own writing doesn’t generally come naturally. In fact, the challenges of assessing our own writing are such that revision must be thought of as a craft that will need to be consciously cultivated. If we think of writing as an art, it makes sense to think of revision as a craft. No matter how you came to pull the first draft together, there are some recognized ways to get it into a more manageable form.

The first thing to say about the craft of revision is that it is different than proofreading. It’s crucial that we distinguish the process of revision from the final process of making sure there are no errors. Lumping proofreading in with revision may result from the fact that we often use the term ‘editing’ to refer to anything we might do to a draft. But separating revision and proofreading means that we are able to distinguish two activities that are inherently quite different: revision is the active reading and rearranging of our text and proofreading is the process of making corrections and checking for consistency (while not making the sort of revisions that so easily introduce new errors).

Even once we exclude proofreading activities, revision isn’t one monolithic thing; there are a broad range of activities that can be called revision.

  • Word choice: Have you used apt vocabulary?
  • Sentence structure: Are your sentences easy for the reader to follow?
  • Flow between sentences, paragraphs, sections: Have you found the optimal order and then signalled that order to your reader?
  • Tone: Have you engaged your reader while still conforming to academic writing conventions?
  • Economy: Have you avoided distracting digressions or general wordiness?
  • Overall coherence: Is there a clear and discernible argument or structure to your writing?

With all these potential questions, it is unsurprising that we often feel jumbled and ineffectual while trying to revise our own prose. One way to tackle these feelings is by creating an effective sequence for our revision process. Here is one such possibility, drawn from the always-helpful work of Joseph Williams.

Broad structural issues: The first thing to tackle are the big issues. This advice may sound obvious, but many writers do begin with the small stuff. The best way that I know to undertake a structural edit is to do a reverse outline. It is practical to do this sort of revision first, before we end up too attached to everything we’ve written and thus unwilling to make deep cuts. This stage should be somewhat ruthless, and ruthlessness comes easier early in the process. During this stage, we should also be on the lookout for those things that may have needed to be written but not necessarily read. Since writing so often functions as a way of clarifying thought, we need to be alert to the possibility that we’ve said more than is ultimately necessary for the reader.

Clarity: Revising for clarity means looking for extra words and for undue complexity. In our quest for clearer sentences, it can helpful to remember how consistently we are tempted to distance ourselves from our ideas with awkward expressions, weak verbs, and unclear subjects. More generally, we are often flummoxed by the conventions of academic writing, which at least appear to require a degree of complexity that works against clarity. There is always room for clarity, but these issues of tone can still give a lot of grief to novice academic writers who are grappling with complex topics while navigating the demands of a new discourse community.

Sentence-level errors: In this round of revision, we will be looking for errors that may not have been caught while we were thinking about clarity. We will ideally be guided here by an understanding of our own particular writing patterns as well as by an understanding of common issues such as subject-verb agreement, ambiguous reference, or punctuation.

Cohesion problems: By this point, we’ve made a lot of changes, so we have to make sure it all coheres. With all this revision, it’s inevitable that new inconsistencies and infelicities will have been introduced. A final round of revision is often required to make sure our newly arranged and polished text flows naturally.

These four stages reflect the revision order that I prefer, but the process could easily be altered to reflect your own preferences. The crucial notion is that revision should be sequenced—to allow different issues to come to the fore in turn—and that the sequence should run from broad to fine.

In conclusion, I want to stress the way that revision benefits both the writing itself and the writing process: as better revisers, we are better writers. Good revisers are better writers because they have the confidence to know that they can fix the problems that are inevitably created during the composition process. Since writing is usually accompanied by some discomfort about the manifest flaws of our first draft, it is so helpful to develop faith that we will be able to fix problems later. There are many valid approaches to academic writing, but they all must end with a solid approach to the craft of revision.

♦

This post is adapted from a presentation on the ‘art of revising’ for a virtual boot camp run by the Text and Academic Authors Association. The presentation is available as a podcast on the TAA site.

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Topic Sentence Paragraphs

Posted on October 15, 2014 | 3 comments

In a recent writing class, I talked about reverse outlines and topic sentence paragraphs as techniques for identifying structural issues in a piece of writing. While I’ve talked about reverse outlines in this space a great deal (both potential applications and potential pitfalls), I realize that I’ve never mentioned the topic sentence paragraph. It’s actually helpful to think of the two techniques as complementary: just as the reverse outline tells us what is wrong with an early draft, a topic sentence paragraph can help us see what is right with a late draft. Or, if it’s not quite right yet, can help us to see what needs tweaking. Our deep familiarity with our own intentions and our own writing patterns means that we often fail to see glaring cohesion problems, even late in the game. A topic sentence paragraph can help us to ensure that all is well.

The technique itself is quite simple: copy and paste the topic sentence from each paragraph into a new pseudo-paragraph. This new creation won’t be a true paragraph because it’ll be weirdly choppy and overly long, but it should be a functional microcosm of the text. As such, it should be able to carry a coherent narrative. A topic sentence paragraph isn’t as dramatically informative as a reverse outline; it’s more likely to offer confirmation than revelation. Once you’ve got a draft that you think is structurally coherent, you can use the topic sentence paragraph as a way to confirm that intuition.

The moment to use this technique must, of course, be chosen carefully. You can’t do it too early−because all it will show you is that the text isn’t ready yet−but you also can’t do it too late. To me, the topic sentence paragraph marks the end of my willingness to do large-scale edits. A crucial corollary to a commitment to extensive revision is an acceptance that extensive revision mustn’t be allowed to go on indefinitely. Otherwise, a certain mania will set in: any draft can always be other than it is. After a certain point, we have to ask ourselves about diminishing returns and about the very real possibility of messing up what is already working. A hard deadline can sometimes stop us from obsessive editing; whether or not we’ve crafted the best possible document at the point of submission, at least we’re saved from endless tinkering. But when there isn’t a firm deadline−as with, for instance, an early dissertation chapter−editing can become a thing that we do long past the point at which we ought to have moved on. If we are to manage our workflow effectively, every text needs to move through our hands and out into the world. The fact that we could always make it different doesn’t mean that we would be making it better or even that making it better is always the best use of our time.

Another reason to establish a point after which structural edits are verboten is that we can’t edit for all types of issues at once. A text must have a point after which big questions are off the table in order to allow smaller points to engage our attention. Not only is it difficult to proofread a document that is still in flux, such a document is vulnerable to a range of new errors that are the direct result of our own editorial intervention. Being strict about the type of editing that is suitable for each stage of the process can help us to create a document that is well-edited at both a macro and micro level.

Drawing the structural editing phase to a close with a final check is a way of making sure that we haven’t missed any ongoing gaps in cohesion and a way of setting the stage for the final edits. This final editing phase can then lead us to a cleaner text and, perhaps even more importantly, lead us that much closer to a finished text.

♦

Academic Writing Month  2014 (#AcWriMo on Twitter) is coming up in November. Read an explanation on PhD2Published and start thinking if this might work for you! Here are some of my thoughts on AcWriMo 2012 and AcWriMo 2013.

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Truth in Outlining

Posted on August 29, 2013 | 2 comments

Recently I was working on a reverse outline of a text that I’d been struggling with. As I tried to write the outline, I could feel the basic incoherence of my text; it can be hard to write an outline when the paragraphs aren’t related to one another or even properly unified internally. But rather than let that incoherence become visible by honestly recording what I’d done, I began to nudge the outline into coherence. So I was left with a text that I knew was terrible, but an outline that allowed me to pretend that things were actually okay.

Despite the allure of the illusion that all was well, I did realize that I was cheating. Reluctantly, I returned to the document and did a proper reverse outline that showed what was wrong: necessary transitions were missing and the emphasis was misplaced. I was then able to rework the outline into a more coherent form, and, with that new-and-improved outline, I was able to revise the text. Problem solved. But the experience reminded me how easy it is to collapse the reverse outlining process by skipping the necessary step of creating a truthful and possibly terrible outline. Our immediate goal in reverse outlining isn’t the creation of a coherent outline. First, we must create an honest outline with all the warts showing; then we can craft a better outline that will act as a guide to revision. By collapsing those two steps into one, all I had done was paper over the ugly flaws in my early draft.

Reflecting on this experience reminded me of a recent reaction to reverse outlines from a student. After I described the process of creating a reverse outline, she argued that it was fine for all those people who write coherent first drafts but that it wouldn’t work for her. Clearly I wasn’t doing a very effective job in the classroom that day! First, I’d failed to make it clear that there aren’t any ‘people who write coherent first drafts’. Or maybe there are some, but they aren’t the norm, and aspiring to become one of those people can be a frustrating approach. Better to aspire to write coherent subsequent drafts and to allow those first draft to help you to figure out what you need to say about the topic. Second, I must have done a bad job describing the reverse outline itself because it is, in fact, the perfect strategy for handling chaotic first drafts. But it only works if we tell the absolute truth in the outline and don’t allow wishful thinking to creep in. The point is to find out what you’ve got. If you cheat—as I did above—you won’t be able to see that. Let the reverse outline do the work it was meant to do, even if that means confronting how far you still have to go.

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The Perils of Local Cohesion

Posted on September 27, 2012 | 2 comments

In my recent post on literature reviews and reverse outlines, I mentioned how doing a reverse outline can snap writers out of a certain complacency vis-à-vis their own writing. As I said there, this complacency rarely entails contentment, but it does impede our own editing efforts. One source of this editorial inertia is the presence of ‘local cohesion’. Even a piece of writing with serious structural issues may work at the local level. And if we lack strategies for macro-level editing, we may continue to refine a piece of writing by improving its local coherence without addressing larger issues.

I recently encountered a problem of this sort in a piece of my own writing. I realized—actually, it wasn’t so much realizing as it was being informed by an astute coauthor—that a paragraph wasn’t saying what I needed it to. I had missed this problem over time since the paragraph itself was internally coherent. Even once I saw the problem, however, I found it hard to devise a solution. The local cohesion had been deepened through many rounds of edits, which meant that the basics were very much in place: the paragraph had a discernible topic; each of its sentences appeared to address this topic; and the sentences had perfectly good flow between them. It was very hard for me to see how to go about making the necessary changes.

This may sound like I am just preparing to say (yet again!) that you’ll never regret doing a reverse outline. And I am saying that: getting at the skeletal form of your writing will definitely help you diagnose problems even when local cohesion is obscuring your editorial insight. However, I’m also acknowledging the difficulty of acting on that diagnosis. Once we have figured out what is wrong, we need to be tough on ourselves. It takes a good deal of intestinal fortitude to break up a piece of writing that is even partially working. It is so often the case that changing our writing has a significant ripple effect. Even if you can identify the particular point at which things go astray, you can’t just fix that point; you’ll also have to do the unsettling work of changing the supporting cast. Ultimately, editing our own writing is an act of faith. You have to believe that if you sacrifice local cohesion to global coherence, you are starting down a path towards a better piece of writing.

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Literature Reviews and Reverse Outlines

Posted on September 13, 2012 | 7 comments

After a recent discussion of reverse outlines on Twitter, I had a flurry of visits to my reverse outlines post. The Twitter conversation concerned reverse outlining as a way to help with literature reviews, so I thought it might be useful to spell out that connection more explicitly. A reverse outline is a great way to address the most common flaws of lit reviews: poor organization and poor articulation of research goals. These two issues are closely connected, but I am going to discuss them in turn.

I’m sure I don’t need to describe how poor organization bedevils lit reviews; the sheer volume of the material makes organizational difficulties near inevitable. The organizational scheme that you must devise is also a genuinely conceptually complex task. It is not like organizing your sock drawer; organizing your lit review requires a deep understanding of your project and its connection to the existing literature in your field. While a reverse outline won’t magic away difficulties, it will help you to confront the limitations of your early drafts. The beauty of a reverse outline is that it prunes away the distracting details, allowing you to see the underlying structure.

Let’s look at a sample reverse outline in order to get a sense of how this might work. As you likely know, the unit of analysis in a reverse outline is the paragraph. We number each paragraph and then ask ourselves some basic questions: What is the topic? Is there a topic sentence? Does the whole paragraph have thematic unity? For a more detailed explanation of this process, you can go back to the original reverse outlines post.)

Sample Reverse Outline:

1. The research into X
• However, there are also a few sentences on Y.
• No topic sentence found (although this might be okay if the whole paragraph functions as an introduction to a particular topic).

2. The historical background to X
• No topic sentence found.
• The paragraph is purely chronological with no thematic starting point.

3. The work of Singh and Johnson, who also study X
• No topic sentence found.

4. The main study that Singh and Johnson were responding to
• No topic sentence found.

5. The work of Gordonberg, who works on Z
• There is a clear topic sentence on Gordonberg, but no mention of Z or any link to what came before.

When we look at this reverse outline, the absence of detail helps us to see some basic problems. The truth is that many of us could have found those problems in the original if we’d read it. But chances are that we would have missed those problems in our own writing, the familiarity of which tends to lull us into a kind of editorial somnambulance. In my experience, that sleepy acceptance is often accompanied by an underlying uneasiness, but discomfort alone doesn’t break the spell. A reverse outline can be like a bucket of cold water. Often my first reaction to my own reverse outlines is ‘huh?’. Why did I put those things there? Those points are in the wrong order! That is the completely wrong organizational approach to that material! It may not be as bad as all that, but the evident weaknesses of the outline give me a sense that whatever I was trying to accomplish may not yet be working on the page. I can then start to rework at the outline level without being distracted by familiar chains of words or complex details.

Revised Sample Reverse Outline:

1. The importance of X, Y, and Z to my research project
• This paragraph will serve as an introduction to the subsequent discussion of X, Y, and Z, so may not have an obvious topic sentence.
• This paragraph may be short or long—or may even need to be broken into multiple paragraphs—depending on how difficult it is to establish the relevance of this topic to your research.

2. The research into X
• This could be more than one paragraph, of course, depending on the amount of material.
• The first version had a historical background paragraph; if that topic does warrant its own paragraph, think about whether you will be giving similar historical background to Y and Z. Another possibility would be that you need a combined historical background to X, Y, and Z; it is very common to speak about the historical background in a more unified way before dividing the field into its important sub-fields. As a simple example, consider the following sequence of sentences: ‘Serious scholarly attention to [topic] began in …’/‘For the next twenty years, scholars tended to …’/‘By the mid-1980s, however, a serious rupture began to emerge about …’/‘In subsequent years, the scholarly approach was often divided into X, Y, and Z’.
• What about Singh and Johnson? Were they included as an example of the work done on X? Are other thinkers being included? Why are they so important? Is the study that they are responding to important for you or is it just important for them?

3. The research into Y
• Try to follow whatever pattern you have established with your discussion of X; the length can vary, but the reader will expect X, Y, and Z to be treated in a roughly parallel fashion. If that parallel structure proves hard to sustain as you are writing, you may need to revisit your initial structural scheme.

4. The research into Z
• The discussion of Z should follow the broad pattern established in the discussion of X and Y.

As you’ve probably noticed, the modifications in the reworked outline also address the second common flaw in lit reviews, the tendency of authors to obscure their own research goals. Singh and Johnson may be significant researchers in their own right, but the reader can always go directly to them for their research. What the reader needs from you is a clear explanation of the way that the existing research serves as a backdrop or source or inspiration for your own. The reworked outline is stronger because it is better organized but also because it links each paragraph into the broader agenda of the author.

In their valuable book Helping Doctoral Students Write, Kamler and Thomson give a great collection of student metaphors for lit review writing (pp. 32–34). In my thesis writing course, I usually read those metaphors aloud to students and ask which one most closely represents each of their experiences. My favourite is the image of someone trying to put an octopus into a bottle. A reverse outline can be a way to convince your octopus to coordinate all its limbs in service of your research plan.

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Best Laid Plans

Posted on April 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

I’ve talked a lot in this space about the importance of extensive revision. Today I’d like to go a bit deeper into one of the tensions that can emerge during that revision process. As I go through a piece of writing with a student, we often find significant discrepancies between the plan articulated at the outset and the subsequent text. Obviously, such discrepancies are common, especially if we are liberal in our use of explicit signposting in our early drafts. But this observation leads to an interesting question: when the plan and the actual text start to diverge, what should we do?

Let’s take a generic example. Imagine an introductory passage of this sort:

Our discussion of this issue will revolve around three key themes. We will begin by discussing X. This treatment of X will lead us into a consideration of the importance of Y. The obvious tension between X and Y will necessitate a discussion of a third theme, Z.

This piece of writing will now head into a discussion of X. Everything will run smoothly until X doesn’t in fact lead into a consideration of Y. Instead, it may lead into a discussion of W. This introduction of W then leads away from the notion of a tension between X and Y and necessitates a discussion of the way W and X affect of our central issue. Once editing begins, we’ll have to choose between our roadmap and our actual text.

Depending on the state of our editing abilities, we will either register this disjunction consciously or just feel a general discomfort with the text. If you tend to fall in the latter camp, try something like the reverse outline to help you figure out what might be triggering your discomfort.

Once you have sorted out that a discrepancy exists, the next step isn’t necessarily clear. Should the plan be changed to reflect the ideas that emerged through the writing or should the text itself be changed to reflect the original plan? Since each case will be different, I have no across-the-board answer to this question. However, I do think it is worth giving some thought to a general understanding of the way this tension manifests itself in our writing. For some writers, the writing itself is generally more significant than the plan. This emphasis on allowing ideas to emerge through writing is in line with my general emphasis on writing as a form of thinking. But there are some writers whose writing process simply takes them too far afield; given a free hand, these writers can end up so far from where they started that the text can no longer fulfil its intended function.

If you are such a writer, you  may wish to approach the reconciliation of plan and text somewhat differently. In fact, you may wish to take steps to avoid a dramatic discrepancy. One technique is to transform the original plan into a series of in-text directions to yourself. Once you have laid out that business about X, Y, and Z, write yourself a few brief sentences (or sub-heads) that will serve as a reminder to remain within certain parameters as you write. It isn’t that you shouldn’t stray, but if straying is your natural mode of writing, you may be struggling with scattered texts. If that is the case, it can be helpful to put  some tangible reminders of the original plan in place. In other words, take steps to make it harder for you to take unanticipated directions in your text.

The key here is coming to an understanding of your own writing practices: do your drafts naturally evolve beyond your early planning or do they need that early planning to keep them on track? Once you have a sense of that, you can decide how to position yourself in relation to the provisional plans that guide your early drafts.

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