Reorganizing drafts
What this handout is about
This handout gives you strategies to help you rethink your draft's organization.
Why reorganize?
A lot of students who come to the Writing Center wonder whether their draft "flows"—that is, whether the ideas are connected in a logical order to make a compelling argument. If you're worried about flow, chances are you're already sensing some problems with your organizational scheme. It's time to reorganize!
Prerequisites
Two prerequisites will help you reorganize your draft. One is vital: a working thesis statement to give you a focus for organizing. If you're having trouble with this, see our thesis statement handout. The other thing you might want to check before you begin is your paragraph development. It will be easier to reorganize your ideas if they are all fully fleshed out.
Strategies
Here are five strategies you can use to reorganize. Read through all of them before you begin and decide which seems like the best fit for your draft.
Strategy 1. Reverse outlining
Let's say your paper is about Huckleberry Finn, and your thesis is: "Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain's Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must leave "civilized" society and go back to nature." You feel uncertain if your paper really follows through on the thesis as promised.
This paper may benefit from reverse outlining, in order to help it realize its promising thesis. Your aim is to create an outline of what you've already written, as opposed to the kind of outline that you make before you begin to write. The reverse outline will help you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of both your organization and your argument.
Read the draft and take notes
Read your draft over, and as you do so, make very brief notes in the margin about what each paragraph is trying to accomplish.
Outline the draft
After you've read through the entire draft, transfer the brief notes to a fresh sheet of paper, listing them in the order in which they appear. You'll get something like this:
- Paragraph 1: Intro
- Paragraph 2: Background on Huck Finn
- Paragraph 3: River for Huck and Jim
- Paragraph 4: Shore and laws for Huck and Jim
- Paragraph 5: Shore and family, school
- Paragraph 6: River and freedom, democracy
- Paragraph 7: River and shore similarities
- Paragraph 8: Conclusion
If you are concerned that your paragraphs may not be unified (that is, that you are talking about more than one main idea in each paragraph), you can make a more detailed reverse outline that includes a note about the main idea of each sentence. This will help you identify repetition, gaps, and places where you need transitions; it will also help you decide where to break your paragraphs so that each one sticks to one main idea.
Examine the outline
Look for repetition and other organizational problems. In the reverse outline above, there's a problem somewhere in Paragraphs 3-7, where the potential for repetition is high because you keep moving back and forth between river and shore.
Re-examine the thesis, the outline, and the draft together
Look closely at the outline and see how well it supports the argument in your thesis statement. You should be able to see which paragraphs need rewriting, reordering or rejecting. You may find some paragraphs are tangential or irrelevant to the focus of your argument or that some paragraphs have more than one idea and need reworking.
Strategy 2. Talk it out
Let's say you're writing about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, and your working thesis is: "The New Deal was actually a conservative defense of American capitalism."
This strategy forces to explain your thinking to someone else.
Find a friend, your T.A., your professor, a relative, a Writing Center tutor, or any sympathetic and intelligent listener.
Since we are more accustomed to talking than to writing, the ways we explain things out loud often makes more sense both to us and to our audience than when we first write them down. Pressure, anxiety, and expectations can cloud our writing, so it's a good idea just to talk about ideas in order to relieve some of those feelings.
Explain what your paper is about
Pay attention to how you explain your argument verbally. Chances are that the order in which you present your ideas and evidence to your listener is a logical way to arrange them in your paper. Let's say that you begin (as you did above) with the working thesis. As you continue to explain, you realize that even though your draft doesn't mention "private enterprise" until the last two paragraphs, you begin to talk about it right away. This fact should tell you that you probably need to discuss private enterprise near the beginning.
Take notes or record the conversation
You and your listener should keep track of the way you explain your paper. You probably won't remember it all if you don't, and then you'll just rely on what you've already written. Compare the structure of the argument in the notes you or your listener take to the structure of the draft you've written.
Another good strategy to try is recording your conversation using a tape recorder, digital voice recorder, computer microphone, or iPod and microphone. This will allow you to talk without worrying about taking notes and then to review the conversation and reflect on how you presented your ideas.
Get your listener to ask questions
As the writer, it is in your interest to receive constructive criticism so that your draft will become stronger. You want your listener to say things like, "Would you mind explaining that point about being both conservative and liberal again? I wasn't sure I followed" or "What kind of economic principle is government relief? Is it communist? Archaic?" or "I thought I knew where your argument was going, and I wasn't expecting you to bring up that issue." Questions you can't answer may signal an unnecessary tangent or an area needing further development in the draft. Questions you need to think about will probably make you realize that you need to explain more in your paper. In short, you want to know that your listener fully understands you; if not, chances are your readers won't, either.
Strategy 3: Listing and narrowing your argument
Let's say you're writing a history paper, and your working thesis is this: "While both sides fought the Civil War over the issue of slavery, the North fought for moral reasons while the South fought to preserve its own institutions."
What might be giving you trouble with organization is that you've created some very broad categories to work with (slavery, morality, institutions). They're all relevant to the Civil War, but there's only so much you can do in a three-, five-, or even ten-page paper. If you look more closely, you can narrow your argument by finding more specific terms; narrowing your argument will, in turn, help you rethink your organization.
In a compare and contrast paper, where you distinguish between and explain two sides of an issue, listing can help clarify both the organization and the argument.
Make a list
In two columns, list the reasons why each side fought the Civil War, limiting yourself to ones you address (however briefly) in your draft. Let's say you come up with the following:
North | South |
slavery | slavery |
moral issues | self government |
humane treatment | right to property |
against tyranny | against tyranny |
against oppression of slaves | against federal government oppression |
As you can see, some of the issues pertain to both sides and some just to one or the other. Thus, the listing process should relatively quickly confirm whether the draft obeys the argument laid out in the working thesis.
Re-examine the thesis
You can now see that the draft offers clearer terms for your argument. A revised thesis statement might now read: Both sides believed they fought against tyranny and oppression, but while the South fought for the political and economic rights of slave owners, the North fought for the human rights of slaves. This revised thesis offers more specifics, which should help you organize your draft more successfully by narrowing the scope.
Re-examine the draft's general structure
It seems from the list and the revised thesis statement that you probably want to establish the similarities first and then explain the differences. Check your draft; did you begin with the similarities and move on to the differences? If not, you need to reorganize.
Reorganize the argument
You still need to ask yourself which differences are most important. The order in which you present your points generally reflects a hierarchy of significance for your readers to follow.
Strategy 4: Sectioning
Let's say you're working on a paper in which you argue for voluntary euthanasia for terminally ill patients on the grounds that it reflects humane values, respects individual autonomy, reduces needless costs, and reduces suffering.
Sectioning works particularly well for long papers where you will be contending with a number of ideas and a complicated argument. It's also useful if you are having difficulty distinguishing between the goals of each paragraph.
Put paragraphs under section headings
Your argument has four main categories of support. Put each of your paragraphs into one of the four categories: values, autonomy, costs, and reduction of suffering. If any paragraph, beyond the introduction or conclusion, fits into two categories or all three, you may need to look at our paragraph development handout. If some paragraphs don't fit any category, then they probably don't belong in the paper.
Re-examine each section
Assuming you have more than one paragraph under each section, try to distinguish between them. For example, under "humane values," you might have listed an argument in favor of euthanasia, a counterargument, and a reply to the counterargument that strengthens your position. Or perhaps you have two separate arguments under "humane values" that can be distinguished from each other by author, logic, ethical principles invoked, etc. Write down the distinctions—they will help you formulate clear topic sentences. If the distinctions can only be made within individual paragraphs—for example, if a single paragraph includes two arguments and one counterargument—you probably need to revisit paragraph development—you may be trying to do too many different things within a single paragraph.
Re-examine the entire argument
Which section do you want to appear first? Why? Which second? Why? In what order should the paragraphs appear in each section? Look for an order that makes the strongest possible argument.
Strategy 5: Visualizing
Many people find that a visual brainstorming technique called clustering, mapping, or webbing is a good tool for rethinking a draft's organization. We tell you how to use these techniques in our handout on brainstorming.
Final thoughts
Learning new strategies for reorganizing your drafts will greatly strengthen your writing process. Most writers find that their ideas develop as they write and that outlines made during the pre-writing stage don't always reflect the structure of the completed draft. Taking the time to examine and, if necessary, rework your organization after writing your first draft will result in a final paper that is easier for readers to follow. We hope the techniques suggested in this handout will help you get things organized!
