inline notes

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 21, 2013 at 02:25 PM

Certainly sub-items can be a substitute for inline notes, but here are a few reasons I find inline notes more appropriate (some of these depend upon how the outliner in questions works):

1. The advantage of outlining software is the ability to move topics around at will. If you begin to mix notes and sub-topics, you have to start making a mental distinction between the two as you’re shuffling your topics around. That is just one more distraction. With inline notes, they remain attached to the topic in question, whether you demote it or promote it, so you don’t have to think about keeping the notes together with the heading, while leaving the sub-topics behind.

2. You can maintain a visual distinction between inline notes and sub-topics, which can be helpful.

3. The topic headings in an outline are often just cheat sheets—that is, they’re there to remind you want you want to write about, but they may not even end up in the final draft… it is the notes themselves that are the substance of your paper. A good outliner (and there are few, if any of these), should facilitate writing of the notes with a clear, clean editor. Whereas, the topic headings are often edited in small boxes. That makes it harder to really conentrate on the writing.

4. With inline notes, you can choose to view them or not. Want an overview of your topics/sub-topics, close the notes. But if you’ve got notes as sub-items, mixed in wth sub-topics, this gets a lot messier.

Admittedly, some of these are more theoretical than practicial, since few, if any, of today’s outliners actually treat inline notes as they should be treated… as mini-documents associated with a topic.

Just my two cents.

Steve Z.