Retrospective outlining

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 31, 2012 at 04:59 PM

Dr Andus wrote:
>However, I find that in the
>process of writing the structure of my text often changes and at the end it departs
>significantly from the original outline.

For me outlining has always been a continuous two-way process in the way you describe and back again; I suspect for others here as well. The tools I use for writing support this way of working, though clearly some are better than others. I would note two aspects to what you describe:

(a) Bottom-up development of the outline; focus on the detail writing and the outline will build/update itself.
(b) Text re-organisation: I expect that when one looks at an outline developed from (a), s/he will become aware of possible weaknesses, e.g. over-emphasis on one argument and under-representation of another, in which case the top-down process would recommence, by adding/removing headings etc.

The way I see it, Connected Text seems indeed very well suited for (a); as Steve noted recently , you can start by creating ‘cards’ and think about the structure later, as connections between the cards develop. I know of many ‘visual’ tools that can do this, as well as (b), but most would be useless for texts growing to the thousands of words with tens of headings.

So, with this application in mind:

- For (a) I can think of two very powerful tools, namely Brainstorm and Sense; a separate post should follow sometime soon from my part on Sense, which is developing very nicely.

- For (b) I would think again of Brainstorm—JB has built a significant part of his Cyborganize system on Brainstorm’s powerful re-organisation features- Sense, as well as MaxThink.