Re: Outlining stages

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3030

Posted by 100341.2151
2005-03-25 11:36:46

Yes, I agree; and it’s something I do, too. But I had in mind those times when - having outlined an argument in detail - I find myself dissatisfied with the result in terms of readability and impact once I have turned it into a finished piece of work.

I think what I am trying to say here is that, while outlining is a great tool for marshalling facts, developing complex arguments, and so on, it may sometimes force a sequential structure on a piece of writing (chronological, logical, or whatever) that might be better presented to the audience in a different way - just as a plot-line might be developed by a writer, but then deliberately scrambled up, revealed in flashbacks, threaded with false clues, and so on, in order to entertain the audience.

So my argument isn’t that one should do without outlining, but that the outlining process - vital to to any cogent writing - is primarily a tool for the writer. Whether or not it works for the reader depends on the type of writing involved. For scientific papers, philosophical discussions, legal arguments the line between outline and finished product may quite a fine one, for in these cases the reader wants primarily to be taken through a logical exposition. For other sorts of writing, as I mentioned earlier, the case may be quite otherwise.

Even that last paragraph seems to me to give a little too much away to the outlining side of things, since the intention behind my original comment about turning outlines into finished work to ask whether detailed outlining did not somehow inevitably conflict with the purely creative (i.e., lateral thinking, associative) impulses behind any type of composition.

But I guess I’ll leave it there…:-)

Derek

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