Re: Writing methodologies

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 3997

Posted by graham.smith
2005-08-29 08:24:55

Peter,

As you are aware there is no easy answer to this,and I think if you browse back through old posts you will see that there have been some reasonably detailed discussion on aspects of what you ask.

As to background, I spend 50% of my time running my own Ecological Consultancy and the other half as a Senior Lecturer in Biology. Nearly all my writing is related to preparing lecture material or technical/scientific reports, but I also write marketing material and other business type stuff.

For information gathering I use Zoot, Net Snippets and and Libary Master, I also use DTsearch for disk wide searches.

Zoot is my “all data hoover” and my overall aim is to have all my data, some how or other, in Zoot or linked to Zoot. Net Snippets I use for specific projects which are web based, graphics intensive, and short term eg gathering information on buying a new computer. However, Zoot will search HTML files so you can link the NetSnippets folders to Zoot allowing Zoot to search your netSnippets files.

Library Master is self explanatory, and we have discussed this before, and I shall mention it again later. I rarely write anything directly into Zoot.

I have at various times used Psions, Palms and now my Nokia 9500 to gather notes while out and about, using whichever method syncs best with the PC and then cutting and pasting into Zoot or wherever.

The Psions and now my Nokia have workable keyboards and lend themselves to serious writing, The Psion is rather better than the Nokia.

Databases available for the all three will allow you to set up picklists for keywords and forms with fields that match Zoot fields or Reference manager fields which together with txt export, will give you a file you can import into Zoot/reference manager. (I have only done this with Access but the same principles apply. The Nokia is new and I am only just beginning to look at writing a database on the Nokia that will export to Library Master.

One way of working with the Palm and Zoot is to use Outlook as an intermediary. The Palm syncs with Outlook Memos and Zoot syncs with Outlook memos. You can then use Zoot rules to move the memos into the appropriate Zoot databases.

Having said all that I probably prefer paper and pencil when I am out and about.

When it comes to sorting data for a specific project/report, what I do depends on the task and its maybe worthwhile mentioning OneNote here.

An area of data that I have to deal with is Statistical analysis. This can generate hundreds of tables and graphs from several different programs and I am now uisng OneNote as a central store for these.

I start most things by brainstorming in MindManager, and use it to generate key headings and subheadings. In the past I would then continue to add notes and text in Mind Manager, but now I quickly move into Brainstorm. Indeed I often now miss out the Mind Manager step, depending on how I feel.

I use Brain Storm as the real thinking tool, writing text, pasting text, pasting lnks, gathering new data etc. Brainstorm is much more than an Outliner, as it allows a strange mix of structured and totally unstructured thinking that exactly matches my mental state when I reach this stage in document production.

As I have mentioned before, Library master natively uses text based “intext” tags to generate bibliographies so I can add links to Library master directly into BrainStorm, or indeed into Zoot, just as easily as I can add them in Word, knowing that when I eventually move to Word, Library Master will sort out the formatting and bibliography. No “cite while u write” of course, but I happily gave up this feature in EndNote for the Library Master versatility. Actually, that isn’t true, “Cite-while-u-write” is rather nice and I gave it up rather reluctantly.

Now during this process, I am likely to add new data which I still want to have filed in my main data store, e.g. Zoot. Fortunately, Zoot will happily search Brainstorm files, and using the auto file sync tools in Zoot, all my Brainstorm models are automatically available, and searchable, in Zoot as well as Brainstorm.

I tend to spend most of my time in Brainstorm, but when I feel I am pretty well done with the Thinking stage, I move the Brainstorm model into NoteMap. Pasting a Brainstorm model into Notemap works flawlessly, and I start to think more about the formatting and tidying up the structure. The advantages of the NoteMap stage is that it still gives a powerful Outliner, so you can continue writing, and it gives you head start in the formatting of the document while still writing it. It has an excellent export to Word or PowerPoint: much better than Brainstorm.

That is my basic set up at the moment and how I use it. also do some writing in Nota Bene, and I occasionally use different tools, mainly as a test to see if they offer me anything useful. But the setup I described is likely to stay for some time as it seems to work well as an integrated and flexible system.

I think thats about it.

Graham

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