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: 4434

Posted by pma
2005-10-27 04:47:51

Jack,
I totally agree with you on your account of the writing process. In much professional work, including academic, you hoover up information, and indeed the job is to restructure this information in a way that is meaningful to your use of the material.

When encountering the information in various resources, much categorisation is already done, as you would find information in topical “clusters”, say, if you read an article related to one aspect of what you are to write, the notes you make from this reading will be related to that aspect, and will eventually go the same neighbourhood in your outline.

Another thing is that categorisation is indeed part of the thinking process, and - especially if you are working on a big project, spanning several months or years, such as a doctoral - when you encounter and read the material for the first time, you are in the best position to categorise it, to find out where it fits into your own writing (though being constraint by the fact that the structure is only emerging). My experience is, that when I return to notes (or sometimes just references) I made months ago, in order to use them for writing, they have turned “cold”, the value of novelty has vanished, as many concepts have become integrated in my knowledge patterns. Then I can be trivial to start all over figuring out how to organise it.

Hence, just plotting all your notes into BrainStorm (or Maxthink, as it was suggested in my earlier posting) in a big mess, and then start categorising afterwards, seems somehow redundant. Here I find that the ArticleOrganizer for Zoot is a step towards the right approach. This is, when encountering the material, you categorise it right away. But then, again, Zoot is indeed not an outliner, and not at all something like BrainStorm, with the focused view and lack of headlines for each entry.

In the beginning of the writing process, you really need a kind of “vague outliner”, where you only categorise in broad terms. Well, it’s really not an outliner, but more a “categoriser”. This set of categories is then gradually becoming more detailed and the outline structure emerges. The challenge is to enable categorisation of items in initial, fuzzy phase, while supporting the crystallisation of the more detailed categorisation and finally the eventual structure of the outline. While bringing forth the actual items in the right places, ie. not loosing the important knowledge that the categorisation in itself is.

If Tom Davis, Marck Pearlstone and David Tebutt got together, they could make hell of a writing applicaton…!

Peter.

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