Sometimes actually writing out your thoughts is not helpful.
We are trained from our earliest school years to:
Write in Whole Sentences.
Use Correct Grammar.
Choose the Right Word.
Outline your thoughts logically.
But that’s no way to generate material for a dissertation.
You need to be quick and messy.
Grab thoughts — even the fleeting variety. Even when you don’t know where they go yet or how they connect to what you want to say or even what you want to say. Or trying to say. Or maybe beginning to think of saying.
You need to be able to “think out loud” and play and wait for connections to grow and reveal themselves.
Or you need to get down to the basics. The core. What’s really important. And let’s forget making it sound good and leave that for later. But you don’t want to lose the thoughts that support those basics, so you need to jot them down Now.
A messy process indeed!
Some people can overcome their early training and do this on paper or in computer documents.
Others among us benefit from using nonlinear tools that don’t require or even lend themselves to the nice tidy linear process of planning, thinking, writing that we were so cruelly taught to believe was Right and Normal.
And if you are one of us, you may be happy to know that computers have made it soooo easy to have a nonlinear way of collecting ideas, elaborating on them in a happily nonlinear way, and tidying them up for later use in that pretend-linear-document called a dissertation.
So here a few options for you:
Mindmaps.
These are credited these days to Tony Buzan, who apparently came up with the name “mind map”, but people have using similar notions for centuries. Here’s a 5 minute video of Tony himself, describing the idea of the mindmap.
Used for:
Really helpful for doing quick brain dumps on a particular idea. The idea is to start from a central concept, and free-associate your heart out, using few and short words, so there are no grammatical and logical rules to follow. And if you use software instead of paper and pencil, you can move ideas around as you feel they connect elsewhere, make notes on each if your software lets you, and move branches around to start creating an order for writing later on.
Free Software:
Here’s a great Wikipedia page with a list of links to mindmapping software, many of them free, and with a number of screen shots.
MindMapping.org also has a review list with some screenshots and comments on usability from their perspective.
What I look for in mind mapping software (or other similar software) is the ability to make notes, to move branches around, and to export my map and/or notes in text form. After that, it’s a matter of usability, personal preference, and import/export options in case you decide to change your software choice. I also found a great little article on choosing mindmapping software.
But don’t go crazy touring all this software — you have other things to do and I have a great suggestion at the end of the article (I save the best for last ;-).
Concept maps.
Looks like this example.
Used for:
Another visual tool that at first looks a lot like a mind map, concept maps are good for understanding/demonstrating relationships and connections; they are images of processes.
Think flow diagrams, circuit drawings, network diagrams; pathway analysis.
Most concept mapping software lets you label the links or connections between ideas so that you can identify the nature of their relationships (e.g., “leads to”; “results from”; “is a subtype of”).
I personally find concept mapping to be most useful when I already mostly understand the relationships and need a graphic display of them to help explain my ideas to myself or someone else. I find them less useful when I’m at the struggling or sorting or Playing stage.
Free software:
Here’s a whole page that reviews a number of concept mapping tools, some of them free: AudienceDialogue.net
Cmap Tool is a popular free concept mapping tool I’m aware of.
Or what about a second Brain?
My favorite personal tool for collecting information on any project where I don’t exactly know where I’m going yet is called (wait for it!….)
The Brain works a lot like a real brain — in a bottom-up kind of way. It looks like a Mindmap, but you’re building your thoughts about things by adding in connections in all directions…
It’s kind of like a 3-D version of a mindmap. Whenever you select a thought to focus on, that thought moves to the centre of your brain. You can see and create connections like ideas that stem from that thought (“child” thoughts), that are related but not a subcategory (“siblings”), or that lead to that thought (“parents”). You can also link to indirectly related, co-occurring, thoughts (“jump thoughts”).
So it has a lot more flexibility than the typical mindmap without a confusing or messy look to it.
From the Brain Blog: “If you are a traditional mind mapper, note that you can have the same relationships in PersonalBrain and then some. In a mind map, each topic can only have one Parent, but in PersonalBrain there is no limit. Also, Jump relationships provide the option of making lateral connections. For more information on this see the blog post moving beyond hierarchies. So for all you mind mappers new to PersonalBrain, the key things to remember are: you are not limited to a single central topic and you can create subtopics below at any point.”
Because your Brain can start feeling pretty full after a while — it has an amazing Search function. Better than my memory, for sure. ;-)
You can link related materials not housed in your Brain (e.g., websites, documents, images). You can create reminders and alarms about dates and events.
And it’s affordable. If you consider free for a personal version affordable ;-). Even if you aren’t convinced it will be useful for you, you’ve got at least go watch the demo (you have to make it past the horrible seizure-producing intro, but do persevere) — it’s an amazing piece of software!
For a peek at how wonderfully complex, yet still usable a brain can become, here is a 9-minute video of James Burke’s Brain. James Burke is science historian, author, and television producer. He uses PersonalBrain for his Knowledge Web Project because “The project underscores TheBrain’s powerful visualization capabilities and the need to go beyond the static information hierarchies of traditional mind mapping and information management software. To be effective, knowledge management software must capture human meaning, those otherwise invisible, non-linear relationships and associations that impact all aspects of our lives.” What more could ask for? And easy to use, to boot.
Whatever you do, find a way to capture those fleeting thoughts that pop up or bits and pieces you aren’t ready to commit to yet, but might want later. Once you’ve got a collection of ideas, thoughts, etc. etc., you can sort them, and start editing for a more formal draft. But if you’re feeling at all stuck or reluctant, don’t start there. Start with free-writing, mind-mapping, anything that removes the pressure for producing something “tidy”.