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Writing methodologies
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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.
Outliners.com Message ID: 3996
Posted by pma
2005-08-29 06:42:42
Some very interesting discussions have taken place here on the use of applications for the various phases in the writing process.
However, these accounts, like in the “My current set” thread, have been pretty brief and summerizing. I would find it very inspiring to read some more detailed accounts of what people do, where the uses of different software tools are put into the real context in which you work. Some of the participants in the forum write non-fiction, other write fiction, and again other have totally different use of outliners. I would find it interesting to see the “person behind the outliner”, to understand your real problems, and how you might have solved them.
For my own part, I’m working on my PhD thesis on interpersonal compatibility in work teams. It has proved to be a rather broad area (which I guess most research topics in the social sciences are), and I would have wished that I had surveyed the tools discussed in here and settled on a set of tools to use from the beginning. If I had used e.g. Zoot from the very beginning, the work on the literature survey would have been less chaotic, I’m pretty sure.
The thing is that a long time has passed from I did my Masters till now, where I do my PhD, more than 10 years. And as we all know, the access to information has just exploded in that time. When I did my masters, I went to the library, browsed through the relevant shelves and even made a keyword search at the PhychLit CD-ROM in our university library (which was very innovative at that time, very few people used electronic searches, at least at my institution). Now, in the 21st century, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the availability of online journals from our institution, the web and even interlibrary loans. There is no limit to it. I’m reluctant to stop the search, as I tend to think “somebody out there must have thought along the same lines as me”, and indeed, they have, though not seriously challenging the required novelty of my research. Luckily.
I should have done more effort on writing earlier in the phases, but I had the classic problem of not knowing where to start and how to structure it, and the problem of perfectionism, want to get it right the first time. So I just continued searching and reading, without writing much. I used TreePad from pretty early in the process, but, as I wrote in an earlier mail, became quite constrained by the outline, tended to continue to think in headings, without much content to put in each heading.
I’ve been pretty good at maintaining a bibliography (in Reference Manager), and even applying categories, so I could print out a “subject bibliography” which has kind of sorted the 400+ references into the appropriate issues/chapters and sections of my thesis-to-be. Eventually, though, I found it necessary to go through all the references once again, as the structure of the thesis had changed since I made the set of categories.
If I could “rewind the tape”, start all over again, I would have used Zoot while searching for information, using relevant keywords, and writing actual pieces of text, explaining every time I found a point, got an idea, inspired by the literature or just from myself. I find however the data entry is a problem when I’m away from the computer. I find it inspiring to take my car and go somewhere beautiful in the nature and just sit in the car and read. Then I make notes on paper. But I need to type these notes into Zoot or whatever, when I return to the office, to transfer them to the computer. This is absolutely not optimal. Zoot can somehow synchronize with Palm, but what about keywords etc? And Palm is not easy to use for making notes. What do you guys to when stuying material when away from the computer?
Through the smart folders in Zoot, I would have an overview of how much contents each category or keyword contained, and I could start filling in snippets of text in BrainStorm.
However, the question is, if there really is a need for Brainstorm, or if it just complicates things, going through Brainstorm before turning towards Word (where the text has to end up eventually). But as far as I understand it, several of you use Brainstorm as an intermediate tool between he raw notes and the text in Word - right? Another problem of not going directly to Word is that Reference Manager integrates with Word throus “Cite while you write”. If I use Brainstorm, I would need to write the references manually, with the problems of inconsistency etc. I consider the references the building blocks of my writing, and the less manual interference, the better. A third problem of using Brainstorm as an intermediate is that when working on a lengthy thing like a dissertation, in some parts you will be on the data collection stage, in other you will be outlining and structuring the things, and some parts you will be writing. It’s a kind of rolling process, where you are in different stages of different parts of the work. I guess that most people don’t complete, say, one chapter, before continuing to the next, but work simultaneously on several chapters. Using different tools for different stages hence become confusing, because which tool do you use right now for this or that chapter?
If I should summerize by problem and the kind of tools, that I really need, then I would say that the picture has become rather blurred, and I would like to have a tool that could help my to make some distinctions. It’s like a painting, where all the colour have become mixed together by some bastard with a big brush (that big bastard is me, I know!). I would like to “separate” the colours again, to see the - MY - golden thread emerge from all the information that I have.
Well, this was my story and reflections. However, I invite other to give theirs.
Best regards,
Peter.