How to Revise Your Dissertation Using Reverse Outline Strategy

This entry was posted in Dissertation Editing , on August 24 , 2020.

There are various techniques that can be adopted to improve the quality of a document. Out of the the many, one that is less popular but quite effective is reverse outlining.

Reverse outline is a technique that is created and used after the writing task has been accomplished. It is being used by seasoned writers, globally for the purpose of assessing the quality of their work.

Usually, the objective behind reverse outline is to identify if any paragraph is overlapped with multiple points and which amongst those points are relevant and whether any points are misplaced or redundant then they can be eliminated.

To begin the process of reverse outline, you take away all of the used supporting writing material and are just left with the main ideas of the papers which are at times represented by the topic sentences of your paper.

The reverse outline can be created in many ways and though, any kind  of outline can be considered appropriate the most commonly followed method is bullet points or the Roman numeral approach. It assists in creating a point wise structure of the content and gives you the platform to look at the main points of the document you have created.

Reverse outlining technique is not just helpful in reorganising the paragraphs but also helps in structuring of the entire work. When your focus is on the paragraph level, you need to figure out whether you need to combine, delete, move or insert any content from the paragraph to make it more focused and concentrated. On a larger picture, it helps to decide whether the desired argument is being created by the document or no.

Your effort of reverse outlining would be a success if by the end you have identified the direction and focus of the paper. You would be able to locate the gaps and the missing elements that could be breaking the flow. Further on, you would identify the redundant content that could be loading the content with unnecessary information or diluting the main focus of the topic. Next in line, after you achieve these important stages, you will be able to create more meaningful and shorter paragraphs that focus on one idea or similar ideas that make it simpler for the reader to understand what the writer intends to put across. To add to the aesthetic appeal of the document, you would be able to add symmetry to the length of the paragraphs so that neither are some paragraphs left too short or too long.