Tuesday October 12, 2021; 2:08 PM EDT
- I keep trying to put my finger on what our schools used to teach about outlining, maybe still do, and how it differs from the experience of writing in an outliner.#
- My note to self about this now goes this way:#
- Schools asked young writers to outline before they wrote; outliner software invites people to outline as they write. #
- Schools asked people to outline before they wrote. To organize skeletal materials, usually in a fairly general way, before composing paragraphs: a more extended, though not necessarily more nuanced version of the content.#
- School outlines were meant to apply a facade of control over the enthusiastic chaos of some young minds. #
- Unfortunately, once a general plan is in place, the most important part of organizing begins: setting out the relationship between adjoining sentences and across strings of sentences. (Which is where and how sophistication of thought has a chance to reveal itself.) That means that in composing the extended and hopefully more nuanced version, the work of organizing continues, on the ground, relationship by relationship, phrase by phrase, precision by precision, nuance by nuance. #
- Schools didn't tend to be able to hand over much insight about that part of the process, I judge, and that's why lots of people entered college not ready to write an extended discussion made up of carefully linked ideas. They were often ready to write papers that resembled bullet lists, which is essentially what an unsophisticated outline is.#
- We've all read a piece of writing organized about the same way as a grocery list. The organization of a grocery list is either absent, or simple--following the general plan of the store. Handy, maybe, but not deep.#
- Outliner software invites a person to keep alive all through the composing process both the broad plan (the bullet list, say) and the sentence-by-sentence linking-and-thinking, where thought has a chance to deepen.#
- Understood this way, what schools used to teach about outlining is misleading and mischievous nonsense. But that nonsense may still be afloat in the dusty back shelves of many brains of my vintage, leading folks to be puzzled about why they'd want to look into writing with a tool for thought like Drummer.#