Reading, Writing, and Outlining

Since Hurricane Katrina struck, I haven't watched nearly as much TV. Why? It was clearly obvious that the news really wasn't changing and the other shows were pretty empty. So, instead of watching TV, I have done a fair amount of reading. I will write more on that later.

Yesterday I saw an article that reminded me of my reading habit when it started with the line:

"Read as much as you can. Read and write, speak and listen." Lessons Learned

Another paragraph suggests that you outline before you write. Anyone that has taken a English class has heard this advice, but many choose to ignore it. One of the reasons that people may not outline is that the outlining process appears to be work not directly involved in the final product (paper, code, etc.).

I do a lot of outlining and use/have used a number of tools on my Macs to help me:

• Hog Bay Notebook
  
• OmniOutliner
  
• LEO
  

Hog Bay Notebook is my current favorite for a number of reasons. The number one reason is that I can generate a LaTeX document from the outline structure using AppleScript (see AppleScript Source Book for some useful examples).

Need an outliner? Check them out. LEO is cross platform for the Mac-challenged.