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Outliner for redacting?
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Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 22, 2011 at 10:44 PM
Thank you, Alexander. To be honest, seeing both documents at the same time is not all that important to me. I don’t care much for the old document. What I want is to reduce it and make it a better new document. So I can keep the old document open in a Word window, if I need to look at it at all, but otherwise what’s more important to me is to be able to import the original document, break it down into an outline, and then start playing with it (deleting sentences, merging several paragraphs into one, restructuring the document).
Posted by DaXiong
Sep 23, 2011 at 02:43 AM
Cassius wrote:
>Inspiration can read .rtf files and convert them into Inspiration files. The
>resulting outline structure will depend on the structure of your original
>document.
>
>WOULDN’T IT BE EASIER JUST TO DO ALL OF IT IN WORD? (My son, a senior video
>game producer, has written both a technical book and a novel, and he finds it
>ultimately most efficient to just do all of it in Word, along with either a file or paper
>listing of notes.)
I agree with Cassius on this ...
I use Inspiration a lot, as well as ConnectedText and just started using Sense - but for what you’re attempting I’d just use Word.
I’ve done something in the past similar, what I did was use the styles in Word to structure the text, and indicate topic sentences/thesis sentences. With this in place, I could use Words outlining ability to see the forest from the trees and do some serious pruning.
Best of luck to you on this
Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 23, 2011 at 11:12 AM
DaXiong wrote:
>I’ve done something in the past similar, what I
>did was use the styles in Word to structure the text, and indicate topic
>sentences/thesis sentences. With this in place, I could use Words outlining ability
>to see the forest from the trees and do some serious pruning.
DaXiong, that is an interesting solution, and sounds easy as well, thanks very much for that idea.
Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 26, 2011 at 10:37 PM
In the end I decided to go with Scrivener for Windows. While I liked the idea of marking topic sentences as headers in Word 2010’s outliner, Scrivener offered a number of additional interesting features. It allowed me to break down the text into an outline of individual paragraphs, where I can zoom in and work on each paragraph in isolation and also organise them into a hierarchy, without altering the text. The Inspector in the right pane is also useful, as I can colour-code paragraphs with labels such as “Reduce?” or “Remove?” or “Important,” making it easy to come back later in corkboard view, when I need to come back and decide what to remove or reduce. The “Document Notes” section is also useful for recording meta commentary on what could be done with a particular paragraph.
But what works really well is the word count. In Word you need to highlight a particular section to get the Word count, and once you un-highlight it, it’s gone. In Scrivener it is possible to isolate any part of the text (a paragraph, several para., a whole chapter), and the word count is displayed continuously, while you work on that section. Finally, in the Binder pane, the outline of the document can display how many paragraphs are in a given section, thus giving a sense of the relative size of each section. The full screen option where I can block everything else out and just work on that individual paragraph is also very nice.
The only downside so far is that I lost the associated EndNote bibliography when I imported my Word file. This means that I will need to individually re-insert all my references (177 in all). But somehow that felt like a price worth paying, given the above benefits. This is my first time using Scrivener, and I’ll definitely buy the license when it comes out.