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Maps e.g., etc.
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Posted by 22111
Jul 17, 2022 at 01:13 PM
Obviously, outlining is also aimed at minimizing the possible effects of the so-called sunk cost fallacy: If you can foresee, you can avoid, at no cost, or at least at much lesser cost.
So, we have “investment” here, in time, work, personpower, money… and especially, in all these means, in non-attribution of those to other, more worthwhile targets.
This “clinging to something” is therefore double: you will probably have got “inner (unconscious) reasons” to cling, and then the “investment(s)” you will have already put in that “thing”, and if you only consider one of these co-factors, you’ll risk (again?) to decide badly, for the suite now.
In other words, your “investment(s)” in themselves had been motivated by unconscious reasons (which had either been more or less unfortunate from start on, or had been “justified” then: this is quite a grey zone, obviously), and then, you might even risk to persuade yourself, “the investment (i.e. cost, e.g. “I would have to throw away too many pages” or whatever) has been too high, I can’t abandon the idea / the element now”, whilst in fact, you far more cling to your initial (but obviously still unconscious) motivation that drew you into making that “investment” in the first place.
Thus, outlining is about foreseeing, or better, about trying to foresee, since any “development” will then, often quite extensively, change the foreseeable; thus, in corporations’ “strategic” departments, most work, ex post, has been “for the bin”, but then and hopefully, will also have provided non-negligible savings in future / further investments.
In other words again, “mourning” is justified, and necessary, in clearly defined spheres, and a fallacy in itself otherwise, since it gives the illusion that clinging to perpetuating sunk cost behavior, i.e. augmenting already sunk cost by “spending” more (time, money, emotional investment…), that “not cutting” instead was justified, when in fact it’s not.
Of course, you can discard such considerations, but then, outlining as an instrument of serial decision making (and of which “creative writing” isn’t but one example among many) will not provide you with its fullest power.
It’s right though that for this paradigm of doing a max of (i.e. also core details’) “development” while outlining (i.e. iterative planning where and as much as possible), a (good) 1-pane outliner would be fine, too; that’s just a question of your individual mental organization.
Posted by 22111
Jul 19, 2022 at 08:40 AM
3rd post of 3 in a row, the previous one being an addendum to the one before, and this one being another addendum.
Yesterday, my parcel with, among other DVDs, “Stop! Or My Mum Will Shoot” arrived - I was delighted from the first 30, 40 minutes or so, very original subject, and very, very funny… in the second half though, gags were rare and much less funny, whilst there was some good action sequence, but in a comedy, it’s the laughter you’re after, hehe! - Since that’s a recurring problem at least 2/3 of all comedies show, it’s worth mentioning, for reminding self-declared “authors” here… (And no, trying to replace gags by “cuteness”, as in this “Mum” example, is bad, bad, bad… (state) television customs…)
Back to work then.
I currently don’t know (but that might be my lack of knowledge only) any (1-, 2- or 3-pane) outliner which would permit to expand / collapse the “tree” (or, in 1-pane, the headings’ hierarchy) down to a fixed level (e.g. “expand first 2/3/4 levels only, while collapsing anything below that”) - in some use cases, such a functionality would be helpful though (and sometimes, its missing is surprising, given the fact that the tool even maintains the “indentation level” attribute, which is the case with UR for example).
On the other hand, the usefulness of this functionality is not as general as you might expect (i.e. as I had originally expected, at least), since in most (but not all) real work situations, at different parts of the “tree” (or headings’ hierarchy), a numerically identically indentation level would not necessarily and conceptionally correspond to the “same” level in other parts of the hierarchy, so if you try to inflict such “importance equivalence” onto your headings in different parts, this could come out as quite artificial.
Another, much more important aspect of “tree building”, is the question what you will put into the “tree”, and what goes into “content”; it’s the same, in 1-pane, for the distribution between “headings” and “content”, then, and that should obviously be a “plastic”, malleable part of creating your content, to become “fixed” only in the very moments before output (/publication); also, above, I have spoken of “serial decision making”, not “hierarchical decision making”, and when you consider the (even today, in most cases, serial!) output, you’ll have to convene that any “tree building” (be it in 1, 2 or 3 panes) is just a framework along which to create the ultimate output, i.e. an organizational, preparational tool, and whilst there are non-linear, mammoth outputs, like wikipedia, it’s highly interesting to observe that, whilst academic libraries for instance, buy most book publications in their electronic version nowadays, practically all those are then as serial, as linear as the corresponding printed book: that - much-touted, 20, 25 years ago - “hyperspace” paradigm obviously has failed to win over the public (or the “publishers”), for self-contained, “finite” works: on-screen or on paper, reader read books as they always did, not necessarily in numeric page order, but in numerically ordered pages, hehe.
Thus, we have found that the “tree” is an organizational tool, for the “writer” (author(s)), and then, it’s its final form, also for the reader, but the question of “what is where” within that “tree” is more or less plastic, and several authors “treat” (i.e. then present) the same subject not necessarily in the same way, and whilst, e.g., in the past, there have been quite some stupid computer books (by third parties, not speaking of the original “manuals” here) which treated software strictly in menu-submenu order (!), better authors then juggled those bits, before publication, to bring them into some, more or less individual, “functional”, “work-situational” order…
Above, I had described in some detail what would be a - quite optimized, according to me - way of “distributing” your stuff between your “tree” (i.e. the “headings” of any indentation level, also in 1-pane) and the “content”, in literary writing, and I personally even go so far as e.g. putting some dialog bit into the “tree”, for further use, and which might, later on, disappear from the tree, being “used up” in some scene, or even then, not even used in there, but having germinated a corresponding scene, with better dialog; in both cases, I preserve the “idea” though, by either “bolding” that dialog bit (so that in case the scene will be discarded later on, the idea isn’t discarded as well), or by putting the - not used anymore - bit beneath a separator line within the “content” there which tells the export scriptlet to exclude anything beneath it from said export -
It’s obvious that that’s the way to “handle” your ideas of all sorts, with any material, in any matter: Any idea to be developed in any form “belongs” into the headings, as a “reminder”, and any (provisionally?) discarded idea should remain “traceable”, and thus, for me it appears obvious that you should not try to “format”, to “classify” your headings (be them in 1-, 2- or 3-panes) by their respective - and really, mostly aleatory - indentation level, but by some real formatting (color, italics), all the more so since you will be interested in holding the depth of your “work hierarchy” (as well as then your final “presentational hierarchy”) as “flat” as possible, so that your ideas in same “area” remain as visible as it gets, even when working in other areas, or when getting some “overview” of the area question, but just expanding some of its depth…
Since that - almost ubiquitous - command “Expand all” is simply not realistic (while just technically easy, for the developer): You may try to visually sift thru 1,200 or 1,800 “items” = headings, but it’s clear as day that it’s much more comfortable, and extremely time-saving, if you (mentally) “recover” your ideas by some “quick look”, so don’t bury them too deep in the hierarchy (and not even mentioning burying them within remote “context”), and have them thus formatted in a way that visually they don’t interfere with your “main construction” (i.e. “chapters” and such), and consequently, I judge tree-form writing tools which, sometimes for reasons of visual “neatness” (maintain a “pretty user interface”), or then since they have introduced technical formatting instead, devoid of sense for the user (cf. Devonthink), prevent (fact for DT is, it would, if it can’t be hidden by the user, seriously interfere with any - probably not even available to begin with - user formatting) the user from (their own) “tree” formatting as conceptual failures, and if some user really preferred to have their “personal metadata” (ideas and the like) in some other tool, ok, but such a (quite convoluted, since it would imply the maintenance of two “parallel”, synchronous hierarchies in the end…) “work-flow” should then be their own, deliberate (and bad) decision, not come out of “necessity” (caused by the choice of inadequate software).
By the above, I do not want to express you should “illustrate” “ideas”, let alone “preachings”; if you can’t “develop” them instead, they don’t “hold”, and more often than not, ideas are passed from within the “headings” to beneath some content’s “discard line”, but then, they often had been replaced by something better… to which they had LED, in some way or another.
As for the “level of detailing” in general: It’s obvious that in academic (opposed to literary) writing, you will have much less problems with decisions about that, since (at least extensive,) final discards later on will be rare (and then be a sign of quite bad planning; in most such situations (sudden discovery of totally new repercussions…) you might discard instead from current project indeed but but then use for a subsequent one; in literary writing though, and considering your “voyage” might take you into paths not necessarily foreseen in planning stage, you might be interested in not too much “writing out” early (in order to not too much being “bound” by your “sunk (time and energy) costs” (cf. supra; and while jotting down the core ideas indeed): Here again, it helps to work “a max” in the “tree” (i.e. within your “headings”), while “thinking about” before doing any writing within “content”; that this way of doing things will also ameliorate your “construction”, probably goes without saying.
Posted by Cyganet
Jul 19, 2022 at 08:58 AM
Not losing items in a long hierarchy is one of the reasons why I like to use a mindmap instead of a collapsible outline. The mindmap has two dimensions (left-right and up-down), and you can see all the headings at any level at a glance (looking up-down), while the different levels are visible or collapsed (left-right). An outline only has one dimension (up-down).
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 19, 2022 at 09:01 AM
Yes, that’s an interesting point. That’s why we all mourn the passing of Tree Outliner (although Dashword is trying hard to replace it on macOS and Windows).
Cyganet wrote:
Not losing items in a long hierarchy is one of the reasons why I like to
>use a mindmap instead of a collapsible outline. The mindmap has two
>dimensions (left-right and up-down), and you can see all the headings at
>any level at a glance (looking up-down), while the different levels are
>visible or collapsed (left-right). An outline only has one dimension
>(up-down).
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 19, 2022 at 09:04 AM
It’s also worth noting that a growing number of outliners (okay, okay, Obsidian, Roam, LogSeq, Effie, Taskade, various versions of TiddlyWiki…) offer multiple views including idea maps AND outlines. Not to mention the various mind mapping apps that more or less do the same.