Reverse outline
Turn a draft into a list of its opening sentences, so its structure becomes visible.
Reverse outline
A reverse outline is a classic editing trick: pull just the opening sentence of every paragraph into a list and read that list on its own. If it tells a coherent story, your draft's structure holds together. If it reads like a pile of disconnected claims, that's exactly where the piece needs work — and you find out before you've reread ten pages. This tool builds that list automatically from any text you paste in, whether it's an essay, a blog post, a report or a chapter draft.
Choose whether each entry shows the paragraph's first sentence alone or its first and last sentence together, which is useful for paragraphs that open on a claim and close on a conclusion. Truncate long sentences to a fixed word count when you only need the gist. Turn on paragraph numbers and word counts to spot the paragraph that's three sentences and the one that's thirty. Skip short paragraphs and quoted material when you want the outline to reflect only substantial prose, and highlight paragraphs that open on a conjunction or pronoun ("And…", "This…", "It…") — a common sign of a weak topic sentence that leans on the paragraph before it.
Paragraphs are split on blank lines, so both single and double line breaks between paragraphs work, and Windows and Unix line endings are handled the same way. The output comes as a plain numbered list or as a Markdown outline with paragraphs nested under their headings — pick whichever fits where you're pasting the result. The tally below the output shows how many paragraphs came in, how many made it to the outline, and how many were filtered out.
Everything runs locally in your browser as you type; your draft is never uploaded or stored anywhere. Copy the outline, download it as a .txt file, or send it straight back into the input to refine your options and rebuild it.