Writing "form"

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 4665

Posted by pma
2005-12-05 19:41:37

I would like to share with you a new method of getting an overview and status of what I’m writing.

I’m (still) working on the literature review for a thesis. For long time I’ve had a fairly good idea of the overall structure, with chapters, main sections, sub section, and topics within each of these. I’ve also sorted the literature according to the sections, by tagging each record in Reference Manager, and using the subject bibliography function. However, as I’m using quite a broad field of literature, with many references, I had problems getting the overall view of where what should go, to actually bring together the literature with my aim of the text, down to the writing of each paragraph. Because I like my text to become very concise, where each paragraph, each sentence and each word has a purpose.

Finally, I got the idea to make a kind of form in Word. It came from the insight that I should have app. 60 paragraphs in a chapter, and each paragraph should have a well-defined purpose and content, and should mostly review some theory or empirical finding.

So I made a simple 2 column table in a word-document (the left column had the following field names; in the right column goes the contents of each field):

Purpose (this would be a brief description of the overall purpose of the paragraph);
Theories (listing the theories to be reviewed);
Literature (the actual literature to be cited);
Notes (notes about what to write in the paragraph) and, eventually,
Text (in which I write the actual text that will constitute the paragraph).

Above each table I write a title for the paragraph, in Header 1 style, (which I’ve modified to normal size, bold font, with a page break above). This whole thing, I’ve put in a separate helping document so that it can easily be copied into the main file by a macro.

I can then use the document map to easily jump between the numerous tables, each representing a topic to become one or a few paragraphs in the final text.

It was a wonderful feeling to gather all the stuff I had collected in various documents into this format, which clearly shows me the status of my work, and gives me a place to put all the snippets of information I find to the different parts of the thesis, all the time. The big difference from using all the different outliner-programs, I’ve tried, is, that in this new format, I’ve actually got fields with the important information. So the overall management of topics and literature has become a kind of information management task, while I can concentrate on the writing of each paragraph, keeping my focus on that. I think that it can work even though you don’t have a very clear idea of the structure of your text, as you can just make each table a topic, and then split or merge tables according to the emerging structure. It’s also quite easy to move the topics around by changing to outline view and collapsing to header 1 (so you don’t see the tables, only the titles of each topic).

If anybody want a copy of the word template, I’ll be happy to send it to you.

Peter.

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