Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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Book Thinkingonpaper

#+AUTHOR: V. A. Howard, J. H. Barton #+CATEGORY: book

Steps to writing:

• Generating ideas Write out everything you can think of; this is a process to /discover/ and /identify/ your thoughts. Record everything, including potentially conflicting information.

• Composing ideas Build a /topical/ and a /sequential/ draft: read over the notes, sort according to topic.

Label paragraphs/pages, add comments based on the observed topics and headings: this is the /topical/ draft. Then /rewrite/ with minimal corrections except for collecting the different pieces of prose under headings and accounting for comments.

The /sequential/ draft is discovering a common sense sequence among the topics: mark out the ideas in the draft as /leading/, /supporting evidence/, /conclusion/, etc. Think about the /arrangement/ of ideas that would suit the reader. Also include connections between these in the margins.

• Expressing ideas
  Incorporating notes from the sequential draft and the associated comments, /perform/ the document while paying attention to format, style, grammar, tone, accessibility, etc.

Write /to the audience/.

— Kunal