Ever find it hard to revise the structure of an article or chapter you’ve written?

I used to. I tended to get stuck with the structure I first came up with. Whether I edited on the computer or on paper, seeing connections between page five and page twenty-five was a challenge.

But no more! A few years ago I came up with a foolproof (for me at least) trick to effectively move bits and pieces of writing around in a text. Here it is:

Print out the pages single-sided. Tape, pin, or blue tack them on a wall, maybe about seven pages across and as many rows as you need (this works best for texts under 35 pages). Then, stand in front of the pages and read, with red pen in hand.

Soon enough, you’ll notice that something you say on page 9 should really go together with that thing you said on page 4, and actually there’s more stuff on the same theme on page 25. You’ll cover the pages with stars and arrows and lines connecting different portions. Feel free to use different colors if necessary!

Really, when I first came up with this (and if I recall correctly, it was actually my own idea for once, not something I stole from someone else), it felt like magic. There is just something about seeing the text visually laid out all at once. I think that being on your feet and moving about as you read might also help. It’s harder to space out when you’re on your feet and actively hunting for misplaced sentences and paragraphs.

So what if you have a book manuscript?

Well, this method is obviously not entirely scalable. But you can try workarounds.

You can work chapter by chapter. Or if you have a couple of closely related chapters, you could tack both of them on the wall with some space between them, or on perpendicular walls.

I don’t think working on an outline with this method is very efficient; the magic happens in seeing full sentences that one suddenly realizes belong together. One thing you could try is creating a document with the beginnings and ends of each chapter (with or without the chapter headings), and maybe adding in between some sentences (perhaps topic sentences?) from inside the chapter to remind you what it contains. Then print out that document (which should be around 30-35 pages at the most) and pin it on the wall. Sometimes it helps, but it really depends on how well-structured your chapters are internally (that is, whether the openings and closings of chapters and the first sentences of paragraphs convey sufficient information about the meat of the chapter).

So some caveats at the manuscript level. But at the level of a single chapter or journal article, it works like a charm!

Image: Generated by ChatGPT. Yeah, not perfect, but you get the idea. Did not think ahead to take photos when my office wall was covered in red-inked pages of my book manuscript!
p.s. isn’t it funny how ChatGPT just cannot get the idea that one would not actually draw on the wall (I did include that in the prompt in several ways, and it confirmed that back to me, but it still draws on the wall. Bad Chat.)
p.p.s. I sure hope your text has more paragraph breaks than this one!