Case Study: A How to Article for Computer Users

Project title: Burning a CD with Windows Media Player (article)
Author: James Byrd
IdeaWeaver Version: 1.0.9.2

The article I wrote with IdeaWeaver was about burning a CD with Windows Media Player (WMP). The inspiration came from my own efforts at burning CDs and becoming a "digital pyromaniac." I had so much fun burning new music CDs that I was certain other people would be interested in knowing how to do it themselves.

Since a lot of people have relatively new Windows computers, I knew they'd already have a fairly recent version of Windows Media Player, so they'd already have the software they needed to follow along. That is why I chose WMP over some of the other products that are available, even though WMP is not considered the best of breed for managing a digital music library.

Getting Started with IdeaWeaver

When I start an article, I usually know the topics I want to cover. I often don't know exactly what I will write or how I will organize my thoughts. So for me, the way to begin was to just start entering topics into the Topic list.

As I started writing article content, I thought of additional concepts I wanted to include, so I put those into the topic list as well. I used it as a cheat sheet of sorts for things I didn't want to forget to cover.

Once I had my topics, I looked them over to see which one inspired me to expound. One of my favorite things about the way IdeaWeaver works is that it didn't matter which topic I chose or how many ideas I had on that topic. I just picked the one that was the most interesting to me at the moment and created a new idea for it.

Organizing the Content

After I entered most of the ideas I needed for the article, I started to organize it. Fortunately, I was doing a "how to" article, so there was an intrinsic order to the material that was based on the steps you need to perform to accomplish the task.

Articles are typically pretty "flat" from an outline perspective, and I found that using the idea titles as headings got in the way of the organization I was trying to achieve. I decided that I'd export without idea titles (this is an option on the export dialog), which left me free to set up the specific headings I wanted. When you look at the screen shot of the project, you can see how the headings duplicate the idea titles in some places, which would not have made sense if I were exporting the idea titles.

Once I had my outline basically the way I wanted it, I positioned myself to the first idea and stepped through the entire article with the down-arrow key to see how it flowed. As the cursor moved to each idea, the preview window showed me the content of that idea. This synchronization of the outline and the idea preview pane is a new feature of IdeaWeaver 1.0.8, by the way. Version 1.0.7 did not have it.

I have to say that I didn't have much use for categories in this article. Almost everything I wrote fell into the general category of "Content." However, at the end, I thought of a category I wished I'd thought of earlier: Transition.

When you write individual ideas without regard to organization, you often later need to insert transitions between those ideas for the article to flow smoothly. At first, I just tweaked the ideas to include the desired transition text. Later (at the conclusion!) I realized that a transition idea category would have worked out nicely. Rather than commit myself to a specific flow, I could create transition ideas that would connect content ideas, leaving the content ideas as independent thoughts that could still be moved to another location in the article, perhaps with a new transition.

The Project Screen Shot

You can see from the screen shot how I used just the content category and added the Transition category at the end to accommodate the Conclusion. You can also see the topics I set up to remind myself of what I wanted to cover in the article.

The outline shows how I replaced my idea titles with new headings. In some cases, the headings are the same, but in other cases, I used a new heading because the idea titles describe the individual idea for my own purposes, while the associated headings in the outline were more search-engine oriented (the article was to be published on the Internet). I was also able to combine two closely-related ideas under the same heading.

Lessons Learned

What would I do differently? Well, first I'd have created the Transition category as soon as I started organizing my content in the outline. It would not have worked in every case, but on some occasions, all I had to do was add a paragraph to the beginning of an idea to make it flow better with the one before it. Those extra paragraphs would have been perfect transition ideas.

The next thing I'd do is use the topic filtering. If you write articles by creating the topics first and then filling in with ideas, the topic filter can save you some effort. It not only restricts the idea list to just the ideas associated with the current topic, but it lets you automatically assign new ideas to the current topic when you save them. That saves you from having to drag the idea over to the topic list to make the association after the fact.

Making IdeaWeaver Better

It would be nice to have more control over how idea titles are used in conjunction with headings. Right now, you have the choice of including idea titles as headings or not. The truth is, you sometimes want to mix-and-match.

For example, if you have an intro paragraph or two under a major heading, you don't want the idea that contains them to display its title. However, you might want to use the titles from the other ideas that follow in the same section.

Conclusion

Just so no one thinks I'm pulling a fast one here, let me make it clear that I'm the principal developer of IdeaWeaver. I'm also an author, which is one of the reasons why I created IdeaWeaver in the first place.

In writing this case study, I put on my "user" hat to the best of my ability so I could give everyone a good example of how to use the software. I'm not pulling your leg when I say that I now write just about everything except email in IdeaWeaver before bringing it into Word for final editing. In fact, I wrote this case study in IdeaWeaver. (Hmm...should I write a case study about the case study? Okay, perhaps that is going too far.)

I know the product has weaknesses, and I welcome your suggestions for improvement. When you provide feedback, we take it seriously here at Logical Expressions, and everyone wins as a result.