Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Reverse Outline
A post by Tanya on a technique I had never heard of before, the "reverse outline" or "after the fact outline." I am likely to use to use, it, or a variation on it, when i finish this current book manuscript. The idea is to take a large project and construct an outline of it after the fact, looking at each paragraph and its central claim, then using that as a tool to reorganize and streamline.
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7 comments:
When you do use it, let me know how it works out for you.
I think my short book manuscript is a lot better now that I did this and plan to use it again as well.
I hope you are holding up well in this heat!
I did that in the margins of my last draft of my dissertation, explaining to myself what each paragraph was for. Some disappeared, some split in two, some traded places.
I tend to do that for re-drafting my texts and for deep reading long documents that need special attention.
It shows perfectly the internal structure of a text and makes explicit flaws of logic and gaps in the argument.
I also recommend this approach. Like Tanya, I read about it Tara Gray's book, but even before that I remember Walter Friedman at the Business History Review saying he uses this method after a manuscript has been accepted for publication.
It also served me well last week when I was drafting my paper.
I learned this one from my father (who earned his humanities Ph.D. in the '50s, then went on to often writing-intensive government work). I'm not sure where he learned it, but it works, and I've passed it on to students (and occasionally used it as a technique to comment on student papers as well -- usually not a whole outline in that case, but as a means of trying to work out what's going on in terms of structure in a particular section of a paper, or the body as a whole, especially with a student who seems to be on to something, but is having trouble articulating it in the thesis and/or organizing the paper).
Jonathan or anybody else who knows: what should be the length of a publishable academic book in words? I've been searching for this information but I can't find it.
40 to 100 thousand words for most books.
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