These Tools Could Revolutionize Your Writing
on concept mapping and reverse outlining
Free Reflection & Planning Workshop March 24!
You’re invited to join me for a free Quarterly Reflection and Planning Workshop Sunday March 24, 2024 from 1-2:30pm on Zoom. I’ll guide you through the process of reflecting on the first quarter of the year and I’ll support you in setting actionable and achievable goals for April, May, and June. I’ll share a recording of the workshop with a transcript with everyone who registers, so I invite you to sign up even if you can’t attend live. Let me know if you have any questions and I hope to see you there!
Big writing projects can be intimidating, especially if we don’t have a set of go-to practices and frameworks to guide our process. Today I’d like to share two of my favorite writing tools for those writing dissertations, manuscripts, articles, and more this year: Concepts Maps and Reverse Outlining.
Concept Maps
As a writer, I like to think on a structural level. I sometimes think about writing like a logic formula or a math equation, where X+Y=Z. I think this is why I love concept mapping so much.
I know some writers who open up a blank Word document and free write to figure out what they’re trying to say and then go back to shape their “word vomit” into sentences and ideas, searching for gems in the rough.
I know others who edit as they write, taking time to slowly pick away at sentences and ideas so that when they finally arrive at a draft, it requires few revisions. While every writing class I’ve ever taken or taught praised the revision process, I’ve seen folks thrive with a slow, mindful approach to editing as they go.
I don’t do either of these things when I begin a new writing project. I start with a concept map, so before I even write a sentence, I’m brainstorming connections between ideas to see what happens in the friction between them.
I shared about concept maps in 2018 for my blog, The Tending Year, where I wrote:
Way back when I was an English major in undergrad, I waited until my very last semester to satisfy my math requirement via a freshman-level “Intro to Logic” class.
Although I anticipated that learning math (or was it philosophy?) would be a total snorefest, I found myself fascinated by the ways that symbols stood in for words and showed the complex interactions between concepts.
Looking back, I’m actually not surprised that I was so jazzed about introductory logic formulas. Whenever I’m writing—an analysis, a journal article, a lesson plan, and now, a whole damn dissertation—I do what I call “turning writing into a math problem.” If I use a formula like “A + B = C, except in the case of D, in which case E” to organize my thoughts, my writing is more structurally sound.
When I have some bones in my concept map and I can envision how my ideas connect to one another, I write a first draft, constantly referring back to my concept map like it’s a recipe.
Additional Resources of Concept Mapping and Mind Mapping
Dr. Marialuisa Aliotta’s “How to Structure Your Chapters in 3 Quick Steps”
Dr. Yago De Quay’s “Dissertation Writing Tips: Part 3: Building Conceptual Maps”
LifeHack’s “How to Mind Map to Visualize Ideas”
Academic Ladder’s “Stuck? Try a Mind Map!”
Reverse Outlines
Once I have a first draft, I write a reverse outline so I can see how my ideas have developed. I can’t remember who taught me how to reverse outline, but I’m not surprised that I love it so much, as it condenses long, winding prose down into concepts and ideas. When I reverse outline, I can trace my argument quickly and identify writing or research tasks that need to go on my to-do list for revision. Having worked with many a PhD student whose professor was asking them to expand on their ideas, reverse outlining is particularly helpful for identifying the connections between paragraphs, which leads to crafting stronger sentences to bridge between ideas.
I generated an instructional video for one of my clients in 2019 showing how I reverse outlined my dissertation chapter. Since then I’ve shared it with many other clients, who have found it helpful in their revision processes. I uploaded it to add closed captions and a transcript, and am sharing it with you today. If you’re not working on a writing project right now, it could be a fun watch to learn more about the way I go about breaking down my own complex process.
Since filming that video, I’ve developed a few more guiding principles that I feel are key to reverse outlining a big writing project. Putting together these reflections, plus the pieces I share in this video, here is my updated list of key steps for reverse outlining:
Print out your draft or open it in a format where you can write comments in the margins.
Go through each paragraph and write summaries of what each paragraph is doing.
Because you're working with one paragraph at a time as an individual task, you can step away between paragraphs if you need a break.
Optional bonus step: Once you've completed summarizing each paragraph, review your 1-2 sentence summaries and see what kind of argument they are building. How do your paragraphs speak to one another? Is there anything you need to cut, add, or move to another position? What transitional phrases do you need to show the relationship between paragraphs?
Use different colors to code things for yourself in the margins, like questions you need to answer or things you need to add, delete, or move in your chapter.
Once you’ve completed your reverse outline, review your notes and identify which of them should go on your to-do list (I like to go through my paper and write a checkmark when I’ve finished that task).
Additional Resources on Reverse Outlines
- ’s “On Writing, and Reflective Practice”
- ’s “Editing Tools I Love”
A Blog about Academic Writing’s posts “Reverse Outlines on Explorations of Style” and “Literature Reviews and Reverse Outlines”
“Reverse Outlines: A Writer’s Technique for Examining Organization” from University of Wisconsin-Madison (includes some good questions you might answer in your marginalia)
Do you use Concept Maps or Reverse Outlining in your writing process? What approaches do you swear by?
See you next week for a post about some exciting news.
Take care and talk soon,
Dr. Kate
What a resource rich issue! You are always so generous and thoughtful of our needs. Thank you for exposing us to other wonderful people I wouldn't otherwise meet. I signed up for the March 24th workshop but I will have to watch the replay as I am not able to make it live. Thanks you for the opportunity.