I found it very easy to write things and break things down, but more as prose than as a series of items to be completed - good for brainstorming. It is targeted towards developing and writing literature, and shows everything on screen at once in a series of columns. This is more of a hierarchical thought organizer than an outliner in the traditional sense. It's an ongoing search to find the right balance of features and simplicity. I've recently tried a few different outliners and hierarchical thought organizing programs. Although I am a user of Org-mode in Emacs, it is not useful as a thinking and brainstorming tool as it doesn't have the ability (out of the box anything is possible in Emacs) to move around stuff easily as in a dedicated outtliner. I can't even find good outliners now for Windows. It is sad that outliners are not seen wide adoption among people but they were big in the 90s and many were hit products (Thinktank, More, Maxthink). Many people use this together with similar other tools like Mindmapping software, which accepts OPML file format as input, allowing work to be transferred seamelessly to tools that are best for the job. You can sort, resort and arrange your ideas in whatever way you like. Later they rearrange them in to heirarchies (paragraphs/headings) to make sense of them. Many 'outliner people' will have a brainstorming session to get everything they have in their minds out in the open. Good outliners (single pane outliners) allows features such as 'hoisting' (hides everything except the current idea under consideration) and sorting features to make thought creation and organisation a breeze. SInce each lilne only contains only one idea, it is easy to move them around without much editing. These programs allow them to be moved around and edited to make them fit with the idea you want to communicate. You can divide ideas to make small sub-chunks while your brainstorming sessions progresses. It can be heirarchichal or it can be flat. ![]() Outliners use each line/bullet as the smallest constituent of the 'document'. It becomes second nature after a while and you feel constrained using any other tool. Keyboard shortcuts are tailored to allow you to do it easily. It is comparitively easy to move text around. Outliners are built for moving things around. In a wordprocessor, cutting and pasting becomes tedious after a while. Outliners let you tinker with the structure without much cost. Clarity comes with having an understandable structure. ![]() Incessant focus on features to reorganise ideas aid in creating logica arguments. With Outliners, you can, in a way, do that. It is not easy to mix and match stuff there as you need to rewrite them often which can become tiring. In a wordprocessor or text-editor you work with logical units of sentences and paragraphs that carries multiple ideas. Outliners helps in this organising aspect. To make things clear often the writing needs to be reorganised because the vision of the writer can't always be conveyed successfully to the reader without considerable skill from the writer. ![]() Anyone who has written more than a paragraph will attest that the important part of writing is to whittle away all the flab by editing to make your ideas clear to your audience. However, the problem with writing is that it is time consuming. You write after spending considerable time distilling your ideas and assumptions to a coherent form. Writing is thinking on paper, giving it a tangible form. I think Outliners are great for thinking and note taking.įor me tools to help me think usually means those that help in writing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |