Web. AIM Writing Clearly and Simply. Is it Possible to Write Clearly and Simply The task of writing clearly and simply has never been either clear or simple. In fact, it can be one of the most difficult of all writing tasks. Clear and simple writing is an art to which many aspire and few achieve. Even so, the understandability of web content depends upon clear and simple writing. Unclear or confusing writing is an accessibility barrier to all readers, but can be especially difficult for people with reading disorders or cognitive disabilities. My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. Ernest Hemingway. How to Write an Outline. An outline is a great way to organize your thoughts and research if youre preparing a speech, an essay, a novel, or even a study. Marilyn Horowitz delves into the process of writing a screenplay treatment. A visual learning tool that inspires students to develop and organize their ideas. It supports visual thinking techniques, enabling students to easily create and. Organize your ideas into a logical outlinebefore and during the writing process. This may be the most important guideline of all. You have to think clearly. An outliner or outline processor is a specialized type of word processor used to view, create, build, modify, and maintain outlines. It is a computer program, or. Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible. Anthony Hope Hawkins. Language and cultural differences matter. To complicate matters, the rules of clear and simple writing in English may not apply at all in other languages, or even between cultures that speak the same language. Many English speaking countries value directness and explicitness in written communication. Other cultures feel that this style is too blunt, and perhaps even insulting to readers. Despite the difficulties in defining the meaning of clear and simple writing, the suggestions in this section may still benefit writers of web content. The suggestions serve as general guidelines for writing clear and simple English, primarily from an American English perspective. Those who write in other languages should seek resources that apply specifically to those languages. Cognitive abilities matter. Not everyone reads at the same level or has the ability to understand text content, even when presented clearly and simply. Reading disorders, memory disorders, attention deficit disorders, and other conditions which affect the brains cognitive processes can compromise a persons ability to benefit from text. The guidelines presented below will improve readability for many people, but not for all. General Guidelines. Outline As Tool To Organize Article Writing' title='Outline As Tool To Organize Article Writing' />The guidelines presented here are not a complete list, nor do they apply to every situation, but they are a good starting point. Writers who take these guidelines seriously are more likely to write clearly and simply. Organize your ideas into a logical outlinebefore and during the writing process. This may be the most important guideline of all. You have to think clearly about a topic in order to communicate it clearly. The organization process is ongoing, starting before any words are written and continuing throughout the entire process. There is nothing wrong with reorganizing a paper as you write it. When you think youre finished, take the opportunity to analyze it one more time to see if the organization still makes sense to you. If it does, greatIf not, try again Here are some thoughts by accomplished writers about the need to organize ideas If any man wishes to write in a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts. Johann Wolfgang von GoetheWriting comes more easily if you have something to say. Sholem Asch. Tell the readers what youre going to tell them tell them then tell them what you told them. The formula to follow is to begin with an introduction, or overview of the papers ideas, explain the ideas in the main body of the text, then summarize or review the ideas at the end. K2L-DXZcg1BF1GUZ3Uodhw.gif' alt='Outline As Tool To Organize Article Writing' title='Outline As Tool To Organize Article Writing' />Automatically formats, alphabetize, and prints bibliographies for free. STEP 5. ORGANIZE YOUR NOTES. Organize all the information you have gathered according to your outline. Critically analyze your research data. Using the best available. Example. In a simplified format, here is a structural analysis of ideas for a paper about baldness Introduction Tell them what youre going to tell themNot everyone appreciates baldness as they should. There are advantages to being bald. Body Tell themMain idea 1 Bald people dont have to worry about the cost of haircuts. They can cut their own hair what remains of it with a razor or clippers. Main idea 2 Bald people dont have to style their hair. They only have to dry their head with a towel after showering, and are then free to move on to other more relevant activities, like reading the comics, practicing yoga, or climbing trees. Main idea 3 Even on windy days, bald people never get hair in their eyes or mouth, at least not their own hair, which makes windy days more bearable for the vast majority of people who dont particularly like the taste of hair. Review and Conclusion Tell them what you told themBaldness allows for some under appreciated conveniences in life, in terms of haircuts, styling, and windy days. You ought to consider being bald. Stick to the point. The more you stray from your main point, the less likely people will be to remember it. Make it interesting. Capture the attention of your readers by including relevant details that motivate them to continue reading. Here are some thoughts by famous individuals about the importance of making things interesting If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing. Benjamin FranklinImagination is more important than knowledge. Albert EinsteinWhat we want is a story that starts with an earthquake and builds to a climax. Samuel Goldwyn. Write for your target audience. You should write differently for a classroom of first graders than you would for a committee of post graduate scholars. In addition, you should take into account peoples areas of expertise, even if they have the same level of education or intelligence. Cultural and gender differences can also play a role in defining a target audience. As you write, keep your audiences characteristics in mind and write accordingly. Assume that your readers are intelligent, but do not assume that they know the subject matter as well as you. The amount of explaining you need to do depends upon how familiar your audience is with the topic. Explaining concepts is not insulting it is helpful, as long as the explanations show that you respect the reader. Some people with cognitive disabilities may need more explanation than others, but when you write for general audiences, assume a general level of intelligence. Some experts say writers should aim for eighth grade level writing. It is difficult to determine for sure what this means. Many popular magazines, such as Readers Digest and Ladies Home Journal are written at about this level. News sources such as Newsweek are written at a slightly higher level, approximately 1. Write cohesive paragraphs constructed around a single major idea. All of the ideas in a paragraph should relate back to the main point. If possible, put the main idea of the paragraph in the first sentence. Example. The following paragraph presents an idea about teams. The first sentence clearly states the main idea of the paragraph Obstacles are a continual fact of life for teams. As you read this paragraph, notice how the other sentences in the paragraph support the main idea in the first sentence. Obstacles are a continual fact of life for teams. They occur from the moment a potential team gathers until the team comes to an end. Obstacles also differ as much as the teams, performance challenges, organizational settings, and business contexts that produce them. The Burlington Northern Intermodal Team, for example, encountered weak support from management, policies against advertising, distrust of truckers, and mediocre talent in the intermodal department. It also faced bad weather, intense competition, and a poor economy when it had to prove its strategy with the two new hubs. Any of these obstacles could have derailed the teams progress and performance. None of them did. Indeed, working through the obstacles made the team stronger. From The Wisdom of Teams by Jon R. Outliner Wikipedia. An outliner or outline processor is a specialized type of word processor used to view, create, build, modify, and maintain outlines. It is a computer program, or part of one, used for displaying, organizing, and editing hierarchically arranged text in an outlines tree structure. Textual information is contained in discrete sections called nodes, which are arranged according to their topicsubtopic parentchild relationships, sort of like the members of a family tree. When loaded into an outliner, an outline may be collapsed or expanded to display as few or as many levels as desired. Outliners are used for storing and retrieving textual information, with terms, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs attached to a tree. So rather than being arranged by document, information is arranged by topic or content. An outline in an outliner may contain as many topics as desired. This eliminates the need to have separate documents, as outlines easily include other outlines just by adding to the tree. The main difference between a hand written outline and a digital one is that the former is usually limited to a summary or blueprint of a planned document, while the latter may easily include all of the content of the entire document and many more. In other words, as a hand written work an outline is a writing tool, but on a computer, it is a general purpose format supported by a robust development and display medium capable of handling knowledge from its creation to its end use. Outliners may be used in content creation instead of general word processors for capturing, organizing, editing, and displaying knowledge or general textual information. Outliners are ideal for managing lists, organizing facts and ideas, and for writing computer programs. They are also used for goal and task management including personal information management and project management, and for writing books and movie scripts. An alternative to outliners are mind mappers, which display a tree structure as a nodelink diagram. The principal attribute of outline editors is that they support or enforce the use of a hierarchy of their items. Editing Sound parent child relationships are enforced when the user modifies the document structure. For example. Promoting, demoting, copying, or deleting a parent has the same effect on the children. Every item entry must be within one level of its predecessor, such that each item must be a sibling or child of the preceding item thus, no item can be a grandchild of the preceding item. Viewing The tool enables the user to affect the display by level. For example. Applying styles by outline level e. Displaying selected levels e. Lifting an entire section out to work on it in isolation, ignoring everything else during that editing, then dropping it back into place known as hoisting and de hoisting. SearchFilter The tool displays only items that contain the query terms plus their ancestors parent, grandparent. File import and export Both the content and structure of outlines are conveyed when files are imported or exported e. FieldsColumns Items can also have additional fields of information. This data can be shown as columns of data in the outline or as fields in the second pane see Layout below. Some outliners also allow the user to create custom fields andor filter on fields. There are two basic types of outliners one pane or intrinsic, and two pane or extrinsic, each with its strengths and weaknesses. A one pane outliner is known as an intrinsic outliner because the text itself is organized into an outline formatindividual sections such as paragraphs of text can be collapsed or expanded, while keeping others in view. Everything is displayed within a single area, hence the term one pane. One of the strengths of one pane outliners is that, because the text itself is what is structured and because several nodes of text are visible at once, it is easy to edit across sections. The drawback is that, because the structure is not always visible, there is not as strong an overview of the whole or ability to quickly navigate between sections as with a two pane outliner. Some word processors, such as Microsoft Word, have an Outline Mode to help with structuring documents. A two pane outliner separates structure from contentthe structure is extrinsic to the text. A tree structure with node titles is presented in one pane, and the text is shown in another. Since the structure is always clearly shown at all times separately from content, this format allows for a quick overview of the structure, and easy navigation. The drawback is that since only one nodes worth of text is shown at one time and navigation has the additional step of crossing panes, the structure is more rigid, making editing across nodes more difficult. This view is similar to many file browsers and email programs which can be thought of as three pane outliners. This type of structure is useful also as a document management tool where the second pane is a document in place of textual information. A one and two pane outliner may be combined as a hybrid. This allows multiple notes text and graphics to be shown at the same time. The organizational power of outline in hybrid is in the parent outline structure, not in the second pane text, making it a very effective structure for topical organization. One additional advantage of hybrid is that single pane can be used as single pane outliner with second pane used for notes or reference tracking. A third approach to intrinsic outlines is the multi column outliner. It is similar to the one pane outliner in that the text itself is organized into an outline format. However, the text sections do not collapse or expand, and all sections are visible but held in a separate column one for each level. This approach allows structure and content to be visible at the same time. Samsung Yp S5 Software Update. File formatseditSeveral file formats support an outline structure natively or encourage the usecreation of outline structures. XML XMLs purpose is to aid information systems in sharing structured data. HTMLXHTML outlines relatively trivial thanks to nested markup. OPML simple XML based format designed for outlines, but also used for syndication feedlists. OML alternative to OPMLRDF various formats has web oriented node arc graph model, a subset can be used for outline. XOXO dedicated HTML based microformat for outlines. CHM standard Windows format for help, books, etc. List of outlinerseditDesktop outlinerseditName. Operating system. Notes. Acta. Mac OS 9. Single pane outliner, free to download. Action. Outline. Windows. Double pane outliner. Multiple outlines per file, selected via worksheet style tabs. All. My. Notes Organizer. Windows. Can password protect file access, supports skins. Free and Portable editions available. Aml Pages. Windows. Outliner support of notes tree. Bonsai. WindowsDesktop Edition Designed to synchronise with the Palm OS version of Bonsai. Brainstorm. Windowstrial edition available. Cherry. Tree. WindowsLinux. Freeware. Manage, edit and take notes. Portable version also available. Circus Ponies Note. Book. Mac OS XSingle pane outliner designed to resemble a spiral bound notebook. Code Browser. WindowsLinuxfolding text editor, can outline source code. Correlate. Windowsfolding text Knowledge Map K MapCollect, organize, outline, share and archive files, email, documents and URLs.