Retrospective outlining

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 1, 2012 at 06:25 AM

Dr Andus wrote:
>I can see that once we move to these
>more advanced aspects of outlining, the software that can do them are either the ones
>that take quite a bit of effort to figure out or the ones that cost quite a lot of money :)

Quite possibly, as with most ‘advanced’ things in life. I look forward to including outlining at the Khan Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/

But then again, the effort to figure out usually goes hand in hand with the power of the software that we employ here; it is quite possible that other tools that you already use can do such retrospective (I would prefer the term iterative) outlining. See below for an example.

Dr Andus wrote:
>So it’s a trade-off
>between having a ridiculous amount of headings or not having a detailed enough
>retrospective outline.

I expect that in Word you can set up styles that are identical in everything except for their outline level. So, for example, below level 3 subheading you could have several more paragraph levels that would be properly indented in the outline view, but without appearing as headings in the text. The disadvantage is that you would have whole paragraphs in the outline.

For such ‘micro-outlining’ I find that Sense is ideal; in the outline you can go down to paragraph level if you want, effectively having a bird’s eye view of the full text.