Large writing projects can be daunting. And despite the rapid rise of AI writing tools, I’ve found that they don’t make the act of writing any easier.
As helpful as they can be in the moment, these tools offer a shortcut around the writing struggle rather than helping you manage it. You end up dependent on a crutch that isn’t always there when you need it, rather than building a toolkit that is always available to you.
In a way, it’s a lot like GPS: it gets you to your destination, but it doesn’t help you learn your way around town.
With this in mind, here are three decidedly low-tech tools and techniques that I’ve relied on for nearly two decades.
The reverse outline: a diagnostic tool for drowning writers
The hardest part of large writing projects is rarely drafting; it’s organizing and editing. In my experience, the challenge involves managing too much information, not too little.
For example, I recently took on a project that involved a complete reorganization and rewrite of a lengthy draft report for a large organization. About 90% of the content was there, but it was scattered and unfocused—like a Lego Harry Potter castle that needed to be dismantled and rebuilt as a sleek modernist house. Before I could move a single brick, I needed to be able to see the whole structure at once.
That’s where the reverse outline comes in.
The process is simple: print out your draft and, in the margins, write the main idea of each paragraph. Then step back. Do things flow logically? Are two sections making the same point? Is a minor idea getting three paragraphs while a central argument gets half a sentence? These patterns are difficult to see from inside the document, but they become apparent the moment you can hold the whole thing at arm’s length.
Curious to try? Learn more here.
Styles: The most underused feature in your word processor
One of my first jobs after graduate school was as an in-house editor for a publishing company. I had considered myself to be fairly tech-savvy and a power user of Microsoft Office. My first day on the job shattered that self-image, as my managing editor taught me how to use the styles pane—that portion of the ribbon that took up plenty of screen real estate, but which I had generally ignored.
Here’s how this feature works: Both Microsoft Word and Google Docs have a built-in hierarchy of styles—Heading 1, Heading 2, bullet list, and so on. Each style consists of a collection of typographic features (e.g., font, size, typeface, spacing, margins).
Judging by the editorial projects that come my way, I would estimate that about 80–90 percent of Microsoft Word users ignore the styles feature in favor of manually adjusting fonts and sizes as they go. This is a mistake, especially on long, multi-section documents.
The styles feature has four advantages: (1) uniform formatting with a single click; (2) the ability to change the look of an entire heading level across the document in seconds; (3) cleaner handoffs to graphic designers (style labels carry over into programs like Adobe InDesign); and (4) the ability to navigate your document by section using Word’s outline view. On a 40-page report, that last one alone is worth the minimal setup time.
Ready to learn more? Check out this step-by-step guide.
Roget’s original thesaurus: Precision over convenience
Most people think of the thesaurus as a simple lookup tool: enter a word, get synonyms. Most online versions work exactly this way, as do most alphabetically organized print editions.
The original Roget’s is different. For writers who care about precision, the difference matters.
Because the original Roget’s is organized thematically rather than alphabetically, using it requires a small upfront investment. You first locate a word in the index, determine which sense of the word you need, and follow it to a cluster of related words built around that theme. The word “eerie,” for example, branches into several distinct directions: “creepy,” “awesome,” “deathly,” “supernatural,” and “weird”— depending on whether you need to evoke fear, wonder, or abnormality. Each pathway leads somewhere meaningfully different.
What I love about this process is that it forces me to clarify my thinking before I choose my words. Unlike online thesauri, the original Roget’s also provides options across parts of speech, making it easier to rephrase a sentence while preserving its meaning. Slowing down to use it is the point.
Final thoughts
None of these tools will write for you. That’s exactly the point. The struggle of a large writing project — the organizing, the choosing, the precision — is also where the thinking happens. The best toolkit isn’t the one that removes that work. It’s the one that makes it more manageable.
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