Outlining software: An essential tool for brainstorming, business planning and writing

By Jonathan Price

Ugh. Outlines. The very thought makes many writers shudder. I understand the revulsion. As taught in high school and college, the paper outline often seemed an arbitrary chore, a rigid plan we had to follow even if we came up with a better idea later, a stupid jumble of labels and formats from Latin and math. Why did our teachers assign them so often?

Well, maybe because our papers were, structurally, a mess. Our teachers hoped that, in the process of outlining, we would consider various possible structures, and emerge with the most coherent, effective, and convincing organization possible. Alas, most of us just wrote the paper and then cooked up a fake outline to get by. We neatly avoided getting any benefit out of all those outlines.

With the invention of electronic outlining, the world received a tool that actually made it possible to realize the benefits promised by outlining. The electronic outliner has made it easy to create and revise an intellectual structure, analyzing the hierarchy and sequence more rigorously than ever before.

But, given the world's prejudice against outlining, a vast silence greeted these new products. True, they were gradually incorporated into word processors and presentation packages, but the outlining modules have not been widely used until recently, when two interrelated challenges arose, which these modules help us solve:

First, many of us face the challenge of integrating vast amounts of information -- many documents, bits and pieces of questions and answers, bug reports, notes, email chunks -- into information CD-ROMs and Web sites. We need to put together the tables of content or menu systems, to clarify the structure so users can navigate confidently, and to identify potential links by category.

Secondly, we must often work with representatives of other departments, subsidiary companies, or partner corporations. We find ourselves having to collaborate on the structure of information as we plan and work on projects together.

In circumstances like these, I recommend that you consider using the electronic outlining module in your word processor, possibly for the first time.

Outlining software arrives

Several computer programs offer us the ability to create outlines electronically. The original dedicated outliners like More (developed for the Macintosh, but no longer produced) have given way to outlining modules within word processors like Microsoft Word and Corel Word Perfect, in presentation packages like PowerPoint, and in complex document processors like Adobe FrameMaker+ SGML. A handful of dedicated outlining programs are also still available, including MaxThink for PCs and OmniOutliner for the Mac.

Electronic outlining does for the outline what word processing has done for the written document. Word processing has gradually transformed our understanding of writing, demonstrating our tendency to switch rapidly back and forth among activities such as brainstorming, note taking, writing, or organizing. By making it easy to revise, word processing made visible what had been obscured by several decades of teachers -- that real writers often revise as they go, that only a small percentage of writers know in advance exactly what they plan to say, that many folks have to go back to the subject matter expert or library to expand on a point in the middle of their writing, and that we may cycle through all of these activities multiple times in the larger process known as writing.

Typical features of electronic outliners

Key features that distinguish these electronic outliners from word processors include:

- You can single out and display all the items at the top level of the hierarchy, ignoring everything else in your document, to consider whether the sequence of major topics makes sense.

- You can show the subheads under a major heading, while hiding everything below them, so you can consider the sequence of subheads without being distracted by intervening text.

- You can hide and reveal the subheads under any heading, just by clicking. Wonder what's under a particular head? Click and see. Want to compare the contents of two heads? Open both, and compare. No more scrolling, or searching.

- You can shift the scale at which you view material, leaping from a bird's eye view to a worm's eye view, and back, as you think about the structure. You can have the outline open to reveal, say, the first four levels of headings, but nothing below; or just the top level; or all the levels within a particular section, but no other.

- You can easily move an entire section of your outline, often by dragging its heading, without any cutting or pasting, and without any reformatting.

- Automatic styles for each outline level: Instead of having to remember weird labeling systems based on Roman mathematics, each level has its own style; when you create a new topic at a certain level, it inherits that level's style. When you drag a topic down to that level, its style automatically changes, to reflect its new position in the hierarchy. You now have far more cues than left-right and up-down positioning and typographical labels to indicate level and dependency: you receive cues from color, size, font, slant, and emphasis, as well as indentation, alignment, line spacing, and spacing between topics.

- You can record notes within your evolving structure. You can write whole paragraphs at a low level, hiding them when you want to look at structure, and revealing them when you want to write. Your note-taking, then, fits right into the outline, as does the writing. The same document accommodates all three activities.

Benefits of electronic outlining

Electronic outlining, in whatever form, lets us think structurally, and keep on thinking that way as we learn new material.

The larger the amount of information, the more we need a robust structure, or else parts will never be found. In this era of gigantic online information piles, we need this tool to plan the structure thoughtfully, and to make sure our headings really reflect their contents in a meaningful way, because so often our headings will serve as items in menus or visual tables of contents, and in hit lists in search mechanisms, guiding the users through hyperspace.

Outlining on the computer rather than on paper, you can create a much more visible hierarchy, not cramped by handwriting, tiny labels, and irregular indentation, and you can investigate it immediately by changing order, level, phrasing, or sequence without recopying, scribbling over, or drawing arrows. You see the effect of any organizational change instantly.

The sheer convenience offered by outlining software makes it possible to record, review and manipulate more ideas with a great deal of flexibility.

It also encourages you to do a more thorough exploration of the evolving structure, as you discover new ideas, revise parts of the outline, and do more research to fill in gaps in your understanding of the subject that you're outlining. Done by an individual in this way, electronic outlining becomes central to the writing process.

More important, electronic outlining can act as a sort of grown-up Lego set, externalizing your ideas and thinking processes in a form where its easy to revise and play with different structures and organizational models.

Collaborative invention using outlining software

Electronic outlining is an ideal tool for recording, manipulating and evaluating ideas in group brainstorming sessions. As the scribe captures the group's ideas on a PC or laptop, they can immediately be displayed on a large screen using an LCD projector -- creating a real-time, shared experience.

I have used this technique many times with my students, and the process is quite fascinating:

- As soon as someone suggests a topic, it appears on the screen. Consider the effect: The screen "publishes" the idea, grants it a place of honor, and places the idea at the center of discussion. This makes participants more likely to contribute more ideas.

- The subsequent work of revising the outline usually forces an encounter with missing topics. As coach, I urge students to delete duplicates and merge topics. Performing these activities takes us through the list of topics again and again, gradually creating a many-leveled organization and polishing the language. The visual nature of the outline helps us analyze and develop quite complex structures. We also focus on organizing the list to satisfy the needs of the various target audiences.

- The many activities facilitated by this software help to model another aspect of outlining: The fact that to do outlining well, you must sometimes go back to research to learn more. Then, on returning to the outline, you must do some rewriting to reflect what you have learned. All three activities take place within the same medium.

- Each new outlining activity demands that the class reconsider, compare, re-read, and look at component subtopics, parallel topics, and the enfolding topic.

- The recursive nature of outlining becomes clear, just as word processing helps to demonstrate the looping-back dynamic process of writing. Students begin to see that they can go beyond the model many of them learned in high school: First you research, then you outline, then you write.

The outline, then, becomes an outward manifestation of the ongoing conversation, a temporary record of the collective understanding to date, and a tool for thinking together.

A clear outline simply means that as writers we have considered the matter thoroughly enough to eliminate many of the verbal attributes that cause readers to scratch their collective heads -- duplicate items, trivial items at the top level, key items buried out of sight, related items strewn about with no connection, a large topic treated without any attempt to divide into its components, related topics in a single list not being grouped together, topics at the same level not having any recognizable sequence, and so on.

Although this example is academic in focus, electronic outlining software is equally valuable for business brainstorming sessions, for developing business and project plans, formulating presentations and speeches, and much more.

And, as I have already alluded to, outlining software is the writer's secret weapon. By investing time organizing your story or article in an electronic outliner, you can speed up the actual writing process, and complete your projects with fewer false starts and dead ends.

Conclusion

The shift from pen and paper to the electronic media has given us a software tool that dramatically shifts attention from a momentary product to an ongoing process, in which structural analysis and constructive thinking are played out on the screen, as many previously half-conscious activities become visible.

Whether you are working alone or with a team, the electronic outliner offers a way to create and revise the structure of large, complicated information systems, spinning off menus and links, improving navigation through the environment.

Increasingly, our work is becoming an ongoing process of facilitating the flow of information, not issuing books; an important part of our contribution becomes the constant revision of the structures greeting our users. So, forgive your dear old English teachers. They meant well. And now, with electronic outlining, you can do everything they hoped you would do, back then -- and more.

Dr. Jonathan Price runs The Communication Circle, a consultancy providing writing, training, and information architecture for major corporate web sites. For more on outlining, see his book, Outlining Goes Electronic and Hot Text: Web Writing that Works

Related Web site: http://www.theprices.com/1cc.htm

Published on 10/15/2003

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