Tuesday October 12, 2021; 8:20 PM EDT
My daughter is getting ready to apply to college and so she's preparing essays for the Common App. I read her drafts last night and I was happy to see the subject she's chosen to write about. I'm proud of the feeling she put into it.#- "There's a lot of great information in here," I said. "These just need some reorganization."#
- Then I told her about how, when I was in my first magazine jobs, my editors taught me to print my article drafts, cut each paragraph into a strip of paper, lay out the strips, reorganize the strips until the article flowed the best it could, and then rearrange the electronic draft to reflect that flow.#
- With most of the writing tools and blogging software we use these days, it's so easy to write a lot, then cut and paste a sentence or a paragraph as part of the editing process. But these don't feel the same as having all of the strips laid out on the desk or the floor. #
- Tonight, though, I was driving back from Greensboro (where our other daughter attends university), and I was thinking about writing an essay about something personal. I pictured myself writing that essay in Drummer, and I visualized the sentences that will go into that essay. #
- I realized, then, that writing with an outliner is a lot more like the scissors-and-strips strategy than most of the word processors and CMSs I use. Even now, midway into this sentence, I glance up and see each of the nodes I've written - each indicated by a little icon - and I know that I can easily rearrange them if I need to with a keystroke (cmd-U to move a node up, for instance). In fact, there's a sentence (node) below this one that I wrote a few minutes ago that I'm thinking of moving to the top.#
- I've been on an outliner journey for nearly two decades, and I'm still learning about the power of thinking and writing in outlines. Thanks, Dave!#
- That makes me think I should introduce Malia to Drummer, and have her prepare her essays using the outliner.#
- And some day I hope she will let me share what she writes. It's going to be very good, and she's going to change the world.#
Tuesday October 12, 2021; 8:20 PM EDT
- My daughter is getting ready to apply to college and so she's preparing essays for the Common App. I read her drafts last night and I was happy to see the subject she's chosen to write about. I'm proud of the feeling she put into it.#
- "There's a lot of great information in here," I said. "These just need some reorganization."#
- Then I told her about how, when I was in my first magazine jobs, my editors taught me to print my article drafts, cut each paragraph into a strip of paper, lay out the strips, reorganize the strips until the article flowed the best it could, and then rearrange the electronic draft to reflect that flow.#
- With most of the writing tools and blogging software we use these days, it's so easy to write a lot, then cut and paste a sentence or a paragraph as part of the editing process. But these don't feel the same as having all of the strips laid out on the desk or the floor. #
- Tonight, though, I was driving back from Greensboro (where our other daughter attends university), and I was thinking about writing an essay about something personal. I pictured myself writing that essay in Drummer, and I visualized the sentences that will go into that essay. #
- I realized, then, that writing with an outliner is a lot more like the scissors-and-strips strategy than most of the word processors and CMSs I use. Even now, midway into this sentence, I glance up and see each of the nodes I've written - each indicated by a little icon - and I know that I can easily rearrange them if I need to with a keystroke (cmd-U to move a node up, for instance). In fact, there's a sentence (node) below this one that I wrote a few minutes ago that I'm thinking of moving to the top.#
- I've been on an outliner journey for nearly two decades, and I'm still learning about the power of thinking and writing in outlines. Thanks, Dave!#
- That makes me think I should introduce Malia to Drummer, and have her prepare her essays using the outliner.#
- And some day I hope she will let me share what she writes. It's going to be very good, and she's going to change the world.#