Note: This article by Hobart Swan originally appeared on Teaching Village, and is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution-Non Commercial, No Derivatives 3.0 License.
Mythoughts mapping for windows download#
Note from Barb: If you would like to download these three articles, Hobie has also posted them on.
The fact that a map allows you to instantly toggle between the overall arc of story and the most finely nuanced details-that alone can take much of the pain out of writing. But I do think that mind mapping is such a protean tool that many people find it a vast improvement over traditional ways of writing. Writing methods are as different as the people doing the writing. I also came to appreciate how easy the map made it to chunk together parts of the story to pitch to the media, bloggers, and for other writing purposes.
In map form, it was just so easy to quickly search the map for the time period or event I was interested in, open up that branch and drill down to find the information, document or website I needed. After I finished the book, I looked back and wondered how else I would have kept all those facts straight-all of the dates and times and events, the settings and the emotion and the lessons learned. And I even used the map to change the flow, to move a chapter that I had in chronological order up to the front of the book to add dramatic interest.
But I did enough to help me get started with a lot of depth and key points to put into each chapter. With such an in-depth project, I wasn’t able to do all of my writing in the map. I hyperlinked to web sites that discussed the things they did in the world, to pictures of their families, their employees, the sites of their challenges and victories. I used visual symbols to highlight the most important events. I mapped out the chronology of their lives. I used mind mapping to write a 50,000-word biography of two people. By the time we finished the remodel, the map represented so many different aspects of the project that “knowledge object” seemed like a sufficiently all-encompassing word to signify this one… thing… that was able to contain so much of what went on in the course of the remodel.Īnd it can do the same for writing. It wasn’t just a list of data points: It contained our thoughts and ideas about the project, our emails with the contractor (and with the bank, I might add). The map we created for the bathroom remodel was a living object: It changed and grew as the project unfolded. But also because it points to something larger, more encompassing than a document or file. I like the phrase “knowledge object” because, well… because I think it sounds pretty high-tech and mysterious. And I like the way I can choose certain branches to export if, for instance, I need to create an abstract or want to pitch one aspect of the story to a particular media, it’s much easier for me to pick the chunks of text I want, export just those chunks, and fit them together than to go through a manuscript and cut and paste.
I like the way I can export the map and, if I don’t like how the writing flows, I can go back to the map, move the branches and their notes to create a new flow, and re-export it all to see if it works better. Doing so helps me concentrate on one thing at a time. I like the way you can bring up a notes window and focus your writing on one small part of the map. I noted in the first article how mind maps allow you to chunk your writing. You can even export your map to your iPod. You can export the map as a Microsoft Project file too-if you’re into that kind of thing (we did this for our bathroom remodel so we could keep track of all the dates our contracting was promising us things would be done by). But you can also export is as a PDF, PowerPoint, Web page, text outline, OPML file, or graphic file. Figure 4: How the Notes window looks when the map is exported to Microsoft Word Outline.įor writing projects, it’s usually best to export the map as a Microsoft Word Outline.
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