Unformation

Outlining is a powerful way to capture notes. When reading I think it's one of the most effective ways both to absorb a concept and to create one. It's also a great technique for everything from revision to planning.

I don't want to bore you with what you've seen before like nodes, parent-child relationships and levels. This is basic and intuitive. What's really interesting is the stuff you can do with it.

Markup

Outlines rely on markup but when using them to record information a bit of custom markup can be quite effective. So where something implies a verb I use an "@" symbol in that line to highlight it. That makes it really easy to find and capture verbs and insert into an inbox.

Capturing Verbs

What about marking up the premises and conclusions of an argument? I see lots of outlines where the top level is a premise and lower level is a conclusion. Why?

Wouldn't it make more sense to raise a conclusion to the top, built upon its premises below? That way you can build conclusions on conclusions.

Then it becomes super easy to track the structure of an argument.

Premise and conclusion levels marked up.

Whenever I read an argument I don't like I find it often pays to outline it in this way. Usually it makes it easier to locate the flaws in the premises and hit back with a better argument.

The DNA of a document

Is there anything especially cool about a piece that you're outlining? A good point well put, a pithy turn of phrase, a nice structure, an underlying theme or a strong conclusion?

We get these ideas every time we read or interpret something. Strange that different people will get different ideas. It's almost as though those ideas - those memes - outcompete other ideas for your attention, but are themselves outcompeted in other peoples' heads.

The idea of memes is brilliant but controversial because it's hard to prove empirically. They seem to me analogous to genes in that they form the DNA of a document.

The DNA analogy works for me because memes emerge from the text - letters and words and pictograms understood a "information". Just like genes emerge as the units of information by which units of DNA organise themselves.

How to represent this? The process of writing-up and interpretation must necessarily record memes. But a parallel outline or additional custom markup is useful to extract the big ideas or quintessence that seems apparent to you.

Memes recorded as connections between nodes on the outline

Now imagine this process working backward. Imagine creating and evolving a document simply by composing and mutating its memes...

The word map

So outlining is awesome for the process of deconstruction, analysis and planning. But what about writing?

Not many people can produce an extended piece of writing spontaneously, in one sitting, without reference to notes and plans. I certainly can't. By breaking a document into small manageable bites you bring it down from macro to micro you present your brain brain with a far easier task.

Fairly basic. You can go further.

Take a bunch of competing ideas you might have read or outlined somewhere. Or conflicting characters if you're writing fiction. Identify their DNA by outlining the key ideas that premise the ideas, or the thoughts, feelings and events that shape the character.

Memes and outline nodes change depending on themselves. Small change in ideas lead to big changes in story.

It's a really simple technique for creating mashups of different concepts, themes or plots. And of course, you'll have broken down the document into a progression of points you might further divide into sections, chapters or even paragraphs.

But still you can go further. Let's say you create a document using this process but somehow it's not good enough. It needs to evolve.

There are a few ways to do this but it seems to me that the simplest and least labour-intensive is to go through any source documents, notes or research that contributed memes and identify where the faulty meme came from.

Then, work forwards. Go through the mashup outline and amend the faulty meme. Work forwards. Any other memes or structural elements that could be affected by the fix will be apparent. Just like a house of cards.

Tell me what you think in the comments. Will this be useful to you?