Reverse Outline: "Objectivity is dead, and I am okay with it."

The Reverse Outline / Essentializing an Essay

 Let's examine outlining as a tool, not for creating a piece of writing, but for analyzing one—whether for the purpose of editing it or simply for the purpose of studying it intensively as a reader.

The first step in analyzing a piece of writing is to identify its theme (or thesis) by breaking down its basic logical structure. The idea is to "reverse engineer" the article to try to identify how it was put together. This is accomplished by creating a "reverse outline"—a list of the points presented in the article in the order they are presented.

One needs a reverse outline to properly analyze a piece of writing for the same reason that one needs an outline to write an article. Consider a typical op-ed length article of about 700-800 words. It consists of a dozen or so paragraphs, making point after point after point. Yet all of these words and sentences and paragraphs are intended to convey a single, central idea—the article’s theme.

What you will typically find is that a well-written op-ed length article will, quite naturally, break up into 3 to 5 sections, each consisting of, at most, a few paragraphs. Each paragraph conveys its own distinct point, but generally each group of 2 to 5 paragraphs will add up to a distinct section of the article and will convey a single, major element of the article's basic argument. These major elements—the points conveyed by the 3 to 5 main sections of the article—will, in turn, add together to convey the basic message of the article, the theme.

The goal of a reverse outline is to extract this logical structure from the article—to identify the 3-5 major points that convey the essence of the author's argument, and then use those major points to identify the author's theme (usually the author’s conclusion).

Constructing a Reverse Outline:

 1. To create a reverse outline, the first step is simply to read the article all the way through. It is important to read through the whole article at least once to just absorb the content and focus on what it says without stopping at every paragraph to analyze its structure. After you have read it once all the way through, then you can begin the process of analyzing it more closely.

 2. The next step is to number the paragraphs. This is not a deeply intellectual step, but it is useful to have paragraph numbers to keep track of the various sections of the article. (Note: When numbering paragraphs, count even the short, one-sentence paragraphs, but do not count "block quotes"—long quotations from other sources that are usually indented and in smaller type.)

 3. The Detailed Outline: Once you have all the paragraphs numbered, you can begin analyzing the article. As you read, notice what point is made in each paragraph, and notice when several paragraphs clearly connect together to convey some larger point. Those paragraphs can then be grouped together, and you can name the larger point that they work to convey. These individual points should be named, not just with a single word or a cryptic phrase, but in a single, simple, complete sentence.

This last point is especially important. The goal in reverse outlining an article is not to have a vague, woozy sense of what each paragraph or section is about; the goal is to identify as precisely as possible exactly what each paragraph or section says. You do not want merely to identify the paragraph or section's subject, but the exact point being conveyed about that subject. So state the point in the form of a grammatically complete sentence.

If you find it difficult to identify the essential idea, ask yourself: What is the subject of this paragraph or section? What does the author spend the most time talking about? Once you have identified clearly what it is the author is mainly talking about, that can help to identify what he is saying about it. 

Identifying the essential point conveyed by each paragraph will produce a "detailed outline." It condenses a 700-800 word article down to a list of briefly-stated points, which capture all the essential points conveyed in the article. It gives the details of the article, in outline form.

To capture the basic logic of the article, however, requires more than the detailed outline. A dozen separate points is still too much to hold in your mind at once. What we need is an "essentialized outline" that groups the paragraphs into sections and identifies the major points being made in these sections.

 4. The Essentialized Outline: Take your list of a dozen or so points naming the essence of each paragraph and break it up into 3 to 5 groups according to the natural section breaks of the article. Each group will consist of a few points that work to convey one of the major points of the article. The goal is then to identify each of those major points by identifying, in a single, complete sentence, the essential idea conveyed by the various paragraphs in each section.

 Again, the idea is not to produce a giant run-on sentence stringing together the paragraph points. The idea is to boil down the essence of those points into a new, brief sentence that captures the essential idea conveyed in that section of the article. That sentence should integrate the ideas conveyed in the various paragraphs in a given section, not just restate them.

 The result of this process will be an outline that is analogous to an outline that we discussed previously. It is a list of 3 to 5 points (complete sentences) that gives the essential logical structure of the article. We can refer to this as an "essentialized outline." These points could also be considered the author’s main premises of his/her argument.

 5. Identify the Main Theme: The final step in producing the reverse outline is to identify the article's subject and theme. This can be extracted from the essentialized outline, just as the essentialized outline was extracted from the detailed outline. One identifies the central message being conveyed in the article, by identifying, in a single sentence, the essential idea conveyed by the 3 to 5 sections of the article, as expressed in the essentialized outline.

 Again, the idea is not to produce a giant run-on sentence stringing together the essentialized outline points. The idea is to boil down the essence of those points into a new, brief sentence that captures the essential idea conveyed in the article. That sentence should integrate the ideas conveyed in the various sections, not just restate them.

Note: For longer, more complex articles, or for short articles that have very short paragraphs, it is not necessary to name the essential point of literally every single paragraph. It is enough to start with a detailed outline that names the essential point conveyed by sections of a few paragraphs. For a long article, you could end up with 15 or 20 of these points. Then proceed as above to produce an essentialized outline that sums up the whole article in 3 to 6 major points.

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