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: 4035

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-08-31 21:06:38

>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.<

BrainStorm may actually be the ideal tool for making such distinctions, because it is close to the precise scenario the developer had in mind. To make distinctions like this—or at least one way to accomplish it—is to read through your material again and again, while using a tool that allows you to reflect your growing sense of its relationship to the topic.

The step after that might be to create an outline structure like the basic structure you have arrived at in Brainstorm in a program that allows you to organize snippets under your headings while retaining formatting. ndxCards and Idea! feature that functionality.

By the way, if you like taking notes where a keyboard and mouse aren’t available or prefer to write certain notes by hand while retaining the advantages of the computer to organize it, you probably should really consider a tablet PC. (This comes from hearsay, not my direct experience.) If you get a tablet, another consideration for your notetaking becomes how well the software comports with the tablet. The programs that seem to have taken the lead in that regard are MS’s OneNote and Agilix’s GoBinder.

Stephen R. Diamond

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