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: 3998

Posted by stephenz
2005-08-29 09:15:27

My current job doesn’t require as much writing as my previous job, but I have been working on a personal writing project, an informal historical guide to the region of North America where I live. This is not a scholarly work, so doesn’t require the depth of research of a doctoral thesis or anything. But I have accumulated a number of references from both secondary and primary sources. I collect these in one of two ways, generally. I either hand write them while at the library and then retype those into Zoot, or I make photocopies of relevant pages and then type those into Zoot. Either way, Zoot is my database of choice because many of the references will refer to more than one historic site, so I can easily have the same reference appear in multiple folders, each folder representing a different site. When I’m ready to write a chapter (a chapter for each historic site), I can very easily find all the relevant references for that site and then, using magic paste, clip them into Brainstorm. In Brainstorm, I can structure and restructure these references til I’m happy, add notes of my own and then transfer the whole thing into Word for the actual writing process. I use MLA formatting, so I can easily cite the references within my text and that goes from Zoot to Brainstorm to Word.

This system works fine for my modest needs. If I were doing something more academic, I’d probably look for one of the citation programs talked about here, or try ndxCards.

Steve Z.

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