Transform Topic Research & Outlining with ContextMinds

Transform Topic Research & Outlining with ContextMinds                  

Many writers hate conducting research for their writing projects.

It's messy. It results in a mountain of notes and sources, with no clear way to make sense of it all. It can be overwhelming and stress-inducing.                

But it doesn’t have to be that way.                      

The right tool can streamline the process of capturing and organizing your research. It should also empower you to organize it into a cohesive outline that provides a roadmap for your writing. Ideally, it should also inspire you with new ideas and suggestions along the way, helping you to create a finished piece that captures the imagination of your audience.

ContextMinds is a powerful, flexible thinking tool that can help you streamline and improve your research and outlining processes – and ultimately improve the quality of your writing. Here’s how.                

The challenge                

Writers today need a flexible way to capture all the research they collect – links to articles, quotes from books, transcribed interviews of subject matter experts, video clips and much more. Saving all of it in a long, scrolling Word document or Google Doc isn’t very helpful. It’s hard to see what you’ve collected because you can only view one page of it at a time.                

Note-taking tools like Apple Notes, Evernote and Notion are a step in the right direction: They enable you to capture each nugget of research in a separate note. This approach gives you a better sense of the resources in your collection, but it doesn’t enable you to see how they all fit together. To use the forest and the trees analogy, note-taking tools tend to keep you focused on the trees; they don’t make it very easy to take a high-level overview of your research or see patterns in it.                

Writers need a visual tool that can help them to organize and distill their raw materials, see patterns in them, extract meaning from them and ultimately discern a unique and compelling angle for their writing.                      

As part of this process, the ability to create a clear and flexible outline is a must. Not only does it provide a detailed roadmap for your writing project, but it also helps you clearly see four critically important things:              

   
• What’s missing from your outline,                    
   
• Where additional research is needed,                    
   
• What can be combined or integrated, and                    
   
• What’s superfluous and can be removed from it.                    
 

The solution: ContextMinds                

ContextMinds is a powerful, flexible visual thinking tool that’s ideal for collecting, organizing, distilling and outlining your research – and giving you a big head start on your writing process. For best results, it can be used in four roles:                

Focus on your audience:

‍The first step of the writing process is to focus on your ideal readers. Who are they? What characteristics, beliefs and behaviors do they have? What problem do they have that your writing will help them to solve? What do you want them to do after reading it? What unique angle or approach will you use to capture their attention? You can use a concept map to explore this important part of the pre-writing process. Remember: your writing needs to be focused on the needs of your ideal readers to be effective.                      

Conduct and capture research:

‍With a clear focus on your audience, their needs and the problem you aim to solve, it’s time to begin researching your topic. Start by brainstorming and capturing everything you know about it, as well as any questions that come to mind. Think about how you ought to phrase your queries for online search engines. How will you decide which search results are relevant and which aren’t?                        

As you conduct web searches and explore results, you can use ContextMinds to capture key concepts and ideas, as well as links to web pages (especially important if you need to cite your work), relevant article excerpts (capture them in topic notes), documents from your files (as topic attachments) and more.                

Sense-making:

‍After you’ve completed your online research, it’s time to take stock of everything you’ve gathered. Look for similarities and patterns in your map topics, and start to group them together. Remember: With ContextMinds, you have complete freedom to arrange and rearrange the topics of your writing project in any way that makes sense to you. You can also use topic attributes such as color and tags to begin to visually categorize your collection by type, story segment and other classifications.                

Outlining:

‍As the structure of your information emerges, you can easily transform it into a cohesive outline. If you get stuck, look to ContextMinds’ helpful topic suggestions. If you find concepts that look like they may be helpful, you can easily drag and drop them into your diagram. No more writer’s block!

Your goal is to move topics into well-defined groupings. Pay attention to their sequence. Your story should flow in a logical order. If it doesn’t, now’s the time to rearrange and add elements until it does.
     

The icing on the cake:

‍ContextMinds can help you to brainstorm ways to make your writing project more engaging – using a metaphor or a personal anecdote, for example. Another technique is to kick it off with a little-known fact about your topic – something that will inspire your readers to want to read on to learn more. Remember, you need to capture their attention quickly, within the first few sentences.                        

Once again, ContextMinds’ topic suggestions can be pure gold to help you with this part of the process. They can illuminate related ideas and concepts that you may not have thought about. They can also bring an important element of serendipity to your writing that can help to elevate it into a compelling adventure.                

Once you’ve completed your outline, you’ll have a comprehensive roadmap for your writing project. Instead of worrying about how to begin it, what comes next and what to write after that, you can get to work immediately and refer to your outline as a step-by-step guide.                      

Your outline will not only speed your writing process but it will also improve the final result. Why? Because your thinking and writing will be better organized. There will be a natural flow to it that will keep your audience engaged. You’ll be much less likely to overwrite, filling your writing project with needless detail or taking your readers on unnecessary tangents.                      

Your writing will have a level of clarity, conciseness and economy that they will appreciate!                

In conclusion, researching and outlining your writing project in ContextMinds is a powerful way to improve it. This unique tool offers the perfect balance of rigor and organization with creative exploration and serendipity. In short, can empower you in ways that other writing and visual thinking tools can’t.                

Why not try ContextMinds to research and outline your next writing project? It’s free! It’s an easy way to determine if this approach fits with your work style.