Background & Context: Why Nonlinear?
When first given the opportunity to research writing, I knew that I wanted to choose something that related to not only my writing process but many other writers’ processes: organized chaos. It was only after having an appointment with a writer who preferred to write their body paragraphs before their introduction that I really started to think of strategies tutors can implement in appointments with writers who prefer to write non-linearly.
Throughout doing research, I kept coming back to this quote from Flower and Hayes:
“…when people compose, the activities of prewriting, writing, and rewriting do not typically occur in fixed sequence but rather are interwoven with each other in a complex way,”
Flower and Hayes, p. 1106
Since I was reflecting on this idea of the non-chronological writing process, I wanted to focus on strategies that could help at the beginning and end of writing processes. My hope was to share strategies that have more range with tutors since we encourage writers to make appointments at any stage of the writing process.
In the fashion of embracing the nonlinear, I wanted to identify something that could consequentially make writing more linear and research how to combat it (essentially, I wanted to work a bit backwards!). I felt that having this as a complement to something that would help with organization in a nonlinear paper in general might allow tutors and writers to analyze the writing process in its entirety and acknowledge that moving parts could cascade and cause a domino effect in a paper.
So, I ended up settling on two topics: cherry-picking and reverse outlining.
Cherry-picking
Cherry-picking, the notion that, “Data that support the commentary are deliberately selected to endorse that same commentary,” often occurs in earlier stages of the writing process, most notably the research stage (Morse, p. 3).
Since it tends to happen so early in the writing process, it can affect nearly every other stage in the writing process. If a writer doesn’t include a counterargument or is pressed on time, the root cause and effect respectively might be drawn to cherry-picking.
Limited scopes can inhibit a writer’s meaning-making and diminish their agency if they feel like they have to follow this one “line” of argument. This might also complicate matters further in the case of creating a reverse outline which may showcase multiple paragraphs’ main ideas as reiterations of one another rather than developments—another potential marker of cherry-picking.
The Reverse Outline
I did not realize it at first, but whenever a writer feels that their paper is disorganized, I implicitly encourage them create a reverse outline. This strategy seems to be common amongst Writing Center handbooks (including ours) and it is even noted in Kelly Grossman’s “UR Tutoring: Handling the Common, Difficult and Unexpected in the Writing Center,” from the University of Rochester.
Especially in academic papers that can feel as though the scroll bar never reaches the bottom, organization might be a primary concern for writers who enjoy the nonlinear.
In contrast to cherry-picking, the reverse outline is a strategy that is more likely to be used near the end of a writing process accompanied by an almost-finished draft. The idea is to break down an entire paper into digestible pieces while looking at paragraphs’ main ideas one by one. Essentially, the reverse outline can, “Determine if your paper meets its goal…Discover places to expand on…See where reads might be tripped up,” (UW-Madison Writing Center).
The Connections
The reverse outline may seem like a linear strategy at first, but again, since it allows writers to look at the skeleton of their paper, it might encourage them to be more willing to move paragraphs around and try new avenues of argument arrangement.
If a few main ideas from paragraphs tend to be reiterations rather than developments or new ideas, this could be a marker of cherry-picking.
By eliminating cherry-picking early on, there could be less “missing perspectives,” which might encourage writers to engage in more reorganization since the argument would be less defined by a linear one (Morse, 3).
The Not-so-Linear Conclusion
Ultimately, there might be few appointments in which these two ideas of cherry-picking and the reverse outline overtly collide, but I think being aware of the possibility of their effects on one another could provide tutors with more options to relay to their writers.
Of course, I have only just scratched the surface of both of these ideas, and I’m sure further scholarship could discover a reservoir of transferable feedback strategies. This attached handout below includes some suggested strategies for implementing the resistance to cherry-picking and implementation of the reverse outline in appointments, and I have also included my presentation slides for reference.
Nonlinear-Tutoring-Guide Nonlinear-TutoringAs always, happy writing!
References
Grossman, Kelly. “UR Tutoring: Handling the Common, Difficult and Unexpected in the Writing Center.” University of Rochester, 2007. PDF File, https://writing.rochester.edu/services/tutors/manualfortutors.pdf
Hayes, John R., and Linda S. Flower. “Writing Research and the Writer.” American Psychologist, vol. 41, no. 10, Oct. 1986, pp. 1106–1113, doi:10.1037//0003-066x.41.10.1106.
Morse, Janice M. “‘Cherry Picking’: Writing From Thin Data.” Qualitative Health Research, vol. 20, no. 1, Jan. 2010, pp. 3–3, doi:10.1177/1049732309354285. UW-Madison Writing Center. “Reverse Outlines: A Writer’s Technique for Examining Organization.” University of Wisconsin-Madison, https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/process/reverseoutlines/.