Does anyone know which outliner would be the most suitable for redacting a text (making a text shorter)? I'd like the ability to import a large text, let's say 20,000 words, and reduce it to 10,000 words, without losing the essential argument. So it would be nice if I could
1. import original Word or RTF;
2. turn it into an outline based on the topic sentences (main idea) in each paragraph;
3. rearrange that outline by merging items, dragging and dropping etc.;
4. delete text easily;
5. restructure the style (hierarchy of headings);
6. export as Word or RTF with revised style.

I took as quick look at Sense Editor which seems to be promising but it wasn't the most intuitive, so there might be a learning curve issue. Does anyone have any experience doing this with Sense or any other editor (easier learning curve the better)? Many thanks in advance.

Although it may not meet all your criteria, Tinderbox has a great "explode" feature that makes it easy to break up a text so that each sentence or paragraph gets its own note. In Outline View, one can then work with the text somewhat as you describe. Lots of possibilities, but it would be of course require some time investment.

Hi Dr. Andus.

I would use Scrivener for Windows for that job.

The only point it may not fit your requirements is (2): You'd have to break the original text up into slices - Scrivener does not do that for you.
Just move the cursor to the position where a new section begins and press CTRL+K or select "Documents -> Split -> at Selection" or highlight a heading and select "Documents -> Split -> With Selection as Title" (CTRL+SHIFT+K). This creates a new note in the binder that you can rearrange as you please.

You would not even need to delete sections from the original text - simply use the "Compile" command to select the notes/sections which you want to export and have them written in a RTF file.

The current beta (0.29) is stable enough to use it for serious work.

Best regards, Franz

For rapidly rewriting text Emacs and Vim are best because they give hotkeys for rapid navigation through text. Vim is actually better at this, but I prefer Emacs for the superior outlining capabilities of Org-Mode.

For heavy rearrangement I would break it into individual lines in Emacs and then import to BrainStormWFO for sorting, then back to Emacs for rewriting.

This isn't really the answer you're looking for but it is the fastest way I've found.

You might also be able to import into ConnectedText, which has the ability to divide up what is imported into separate notes according to a user-defined delimiter. You could even then go from CT to Scrivener for Windows via OPML. But that's just off the top of my head --- surely there are other options (IQ, etc).

Many thanks for the prompt replies. Great suggestions. Unfortunately I don't have a Mac, so I can only explore the PC suggestions. As I'm really pressed for time, I will probably try the most intuitive software suggested, which seems to be Scrivener.

Later on I'll try to come back to ConnectedText and Emacs and Vim. I've tried ConnectedText in the past, but for some reason I couldn't get my head around it. Similarly, Emacs and Vim seem like requiring a steep learning curve. I don't have a techie background, so I'm coming at it with more of a humanities-type of brain.

I might give Sense another try as well. I have a feeling that I haven't quite grasped its full potential.

This is the problem with us artsy types: if the manual and help files (or even the website) are too technical in language, it becomes a turn-off... Maybe that's why I never mastered UltraRecall...

Emacs is impossibly forbidding unless you find the right resources, and then it's pretty easy. I haven't tried vim yet but would probably use an emacs minor-mode to emulate it.

Anyway here's a resource page and video I made that teaches emacs for humanities types (skipping the programming nonsense): http://www.cyborganize.org/productivity/videos/fast-start/emacs-org-mode-installation-configuration-and-tutorial/

Inspiration can read .rtf files and convert them into Inspiration files. The resulting outline structure will depend on the structure of your original document.

WOULDN'T IT BE EASIER JUST TO DO ALL OF IT IN WORD? (My son, a senior video game producer, has written both a technical book and a novel, and he finds it ultimately most efficient to just do all of it in Word, along with either a file or paper listing of notes.)

Cassius wrote:

WOULDN'T IT BE EASIER JUST TO DO ALL OF IT IN WORD? (My son, a senior video
game producer, has written both a technical book and a novel, and he finds it
ultimately most efficient to just do all of it in Word, along with either a file or paper
listing of notes.)

In my case it's not only about what is the easiest and most efficient. I'm hoping that by using the right kind of tool I will be able to get a better understanding of the content and structure of the text, so that by reducing it in size I can increase the quality of the text. Working with Word you can only see the bit that's in front of you, while breaking it down into an outline I can get a sense of the relative importance of various sections and identify paragraphs that can be merged. Plus, I'm a CRIMPer, don't forget...

Dr Andus wrote:

1. import original Word or RTF;
2. turn it into an outline
based on the topic sentences (main idea) in each paragraph;

1 and 2 can be done by several mindmapping programs (MindView springs to mind as one of the best), and also the humble MyInfo. Styles should be used in paragraph titles to be correctly identified. Thereon however, none of these tools are particularly aimed at writing, so you may not find them very comfortable.

Assuming that rich text is secondary, my own choice would be Brainstorm (BrainstormSW or BrainstormWFO or whatever it is called these days :-) Here's what I would do:

- Copy paste the whole text under a header, say 'ORIGINAL' in Brainstorm.

- Paste it again, under a second heading, say, 'REDACTED'; Brainstorm will identify each identical paragraph as a 'namesake'. Press Ctrl-A and Ctrl-N to 'cut off' the relationship. This way, changes to one will not be reflected to the other.

- Keep two windows open, side by side, move to each corresponding paragraph, and edit the paragraph in place.

I have done the above several times in the past; I have not found something better yet. Sense Pro can now open two documents at the time, so it may indeed be well suited for such work, but I have not tried this aspect yet.

Thank you, Alexander. To be honest, seeing both documents at the same time is not all that important to me. I don't care much for the old document. What I want is to reduce it and make it a better new document. So I can keep the old document open in a Word window, if I need to look at it at all, but otherwise what's more important to me is to be able to import the original document, break it down into an outline, and then start playing with it (deleting sentences, merging several paragraphs into one, restructuring the document).

Cassius wrote:

Inspiration can read .rtf files and convert them into Inspiration files. The
resulting outline structure will depend on the structure of your original
document.

WOULDN'T IT BE EASIER JUST TO DO ALL OF IT IN WORD? (My son, a senior video
game producer, has written both a technical book and a novel, and he finds it
ultimately most efficient to just do all of it in Word, along with either a file or paper
listing of notes.)

I agree with Cassius on this ...

I use Inspiration a lot, as well as ConnectedText and just started using Sense - but for what you're attempting I'd just use Word.

I've done something in the past similar, what I did was use the styles in Word to structure the text, and indicate topic sentences/thesis sentences. With this in place, I could use Words outlining ability to see the forest from the trees and do some serious pruning.

Best of luck to you on this

DaXiong wrote:

I've done something in the past similar, what I
did was use the styles in Word to structure the text, and indicate topic
sentences/thesis sentences. With this in place, I could use Words outlining ability
to see the forest from the trees and do some serious pruning.

DaXiong, that is an interesting solution, and sounds easy as well, thanks very much for that idea.

In the end I decided to go with Scrivener for Windows. While I liked the idea of marking topic sentences as headers in Word 2010's outliner, Scrivener offered a number of additional interesting features. It allowed me to break down the text into an outline of individual paragraphs, where I can zoom in and work on each paragraph in isolation and also organise them into a hierarchy, without altering the text. The Inspector in the right pane is also useful, as I can colour-code paragraphs with labels such as "Reduce?" or "Remove?" or "Important," making it easy to come back later in corkboard view, when I need to come back and decide what to remove or reduce. The "Document Notes" section is also useful for recording meta commentary on what could be done with a particular paragraph.

But what works really well is the word count. In Word you need to highlight a particular section to get the Word count, and once you un-highlight it, it's gone. In Scrivener it is possible to isolate any part of the text (a paragraph, several para., a whole chapter), and the word count is displayed continuously, while you work on that section. Finally, in the Binder pane, the outline of the document can display how many paragraphs are in a given section, thus giving a sense of the relative size of each section. The full screen option where I can block everything else out and just work on that individual paragraph is also very nice.

The only downside so far is that I lost the associated EndNote bibliography when I imported my Word file. This means that I will need to individually re-insert all my references (177 in all). But somehow that felt like a price worth paying, given the above benefits. This is my first time using Scrivener, and I'll definitely buy the license when it comes out.