Re: Should Brainstorm be part of a multi-faceted outliner

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 4398

Posted by 100341.2151
2005-10-25 12:36:14

Steve: (sorry for this excessively long screed that your post prompted)

The ability to “hoist” has long been a feature of conventional high-end single-pane outliners in the DOS world, but always combined with a completely active “unhoisted” full outline view. While I like Brainstorm’s agility (I’m a registered user), like you I do find the lack of an “active” outline view a great disadvantage, and one reason I keep going back to Grandview, which seems to me to combine the best of both worlds - the ability to work on detail, plus a manipulable view of the total picture/argument.

There was some earlier discussion (by you and others) on one of the Brainstorm forums about whether making its aerial view more “active” might detract from the essential mission of the software. Personally I don’t think so, so long as the user has the option of turning off any aerial view enhancements - perhaps by having a classic mode and an enhanced mode. (I’d predict that few would use the classic mode, once they had experienced the benefits of the enhanced arial view, however.)

I think you are absolutely right about the need for “labels” (i.e., Harvard, Legal, Numbered, Bullets, etc) as ways of orienting oneself within a complete outline/aerial view. Of course, implementing all this in Brainstorm, unless done skillfully, might be difficult. And it would certainly turn it into a rather different type of beast: a powerful one-pane outliner with specialized brainstorming features. I’d like to see that, but I can undertand that it might not be what most users need or want.

A lot of confusion [IMHO :-)] could be avoided by discussing outlining as a three-stage process: brainstorming; structuring and developing the argument; and polishing the draft (article, report, short story, or whatever).

Brainstorming: this involves the initial generating and organizing of thoughts, snippets of ideas, keywords, phrases, etc. These are gathered into one place where each item can be worked on and related to other items. As pockets of coherence emerge, these can be linked to other pockets, the goal being to organize the initial inchoate mess into something resembling a series of connected, hierarchically organized ideas.

Structuring and developing: once an inital outline has been achieved, the more leisurely task of expanding and developing individual points and families of ideas into a connected prose argument begins. At this stage, although hoisting may still be useful, viewing the argument structure as a whole - and being able to consider and manipulate its components - becomes crucial as one considers issues such as argument development, sequencing, transitioning and so on.

Polishing the draft: I include this because people (including myself) have often criticised Word and Nota Bene for their clunky outlining abilities. At the third stage, however, one may only require quite basic though specialized outlining features. Here, one tends to be dealing with more-or-less of a draft report, MSS or whatever, and at this point the value of an outline view is largely for making simple last-minute changes to the overall structure (e.g. promoting, demoting or moving headings and associated text), moving quickly through the draft, imposing particular publication styles, and providing a table of contents (TOC), etc.

Well, that’s just my take on it, but if nothing else it suggests that each of the existing outlining tools has different strengths and weaknesses, and that these may make them better suited to some stages of the process than to others - and to particular individual ways of working, of course.

I’d tend to see stage three outlining as best left to heavyweight wordprocessing packages, so long as they have the facility to import stage two outlines and display them as both drafts and outlines. As for stage one and two outlining, although a case can be made for keeping them separate and using specialized software for each, I tend to think that it is the current inadequacies of existing software (e.g. Brainstorm and NoteMap) to do both tasks well that lead people to believe that developing software to do both tasks together can’t be done.

Derek

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