Notetaking: Yesterday and today

Are you old enough to remember learning to "outline" as a child in English class?

As I scribbled notes for an article last week, I suddenly felt I'd never make sense of the fragments I jotted down.  I picked up the notes today and found I was right. My brain works better at laptop-speed. My notes are caotyred qyucjkyt, oops, that was supposed to be 'captured quickly,' make more sense, and are legible. If I failed at outlining in school, at least I excel at fast typing.

Yet before computers let our ideas fly with instant transfer from thought to document,  people sat with paper and pen and gave great thought to each word written. After all they could not highlight and delete a paragraph of longhand, so better preparation by outlining might have been the only way to organize the flow of words from mind to hand.

To my delight, I found Creative Nonfiction's weekly email led me to evidence of the very thing I was contemplating: notetaking.

Here, for example is Sylvia Plath's outline for The Bell Jar. This one-page outline is hard to read, but you can clearly see her math showing it would top out at 280 pages. Published in 1963, Wikipedia lists the book's published page count at 288. Isn't that impressive?




Okay, just one more -- J.K. Rowling's outline for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix



You'll find these and a half-dozen more at FlavorWire here

The "slow" move to better online content

We've seen a resurgence and new respect for long-form journalism, after a few years of tweets and status updates that don't add anything lasting to our literary world. Now comes a call for "Slow Media." 

"Every person with an Internet connection now has a place to go to find news as it breaks. We are only just beginning, however, to realize the Internet’s power as a promoter of longform content, a recognition that is helping to drive the rise of micropublishing, a movement that emphasizes the quality of the publishing environment over timeliness, and one that eschews the primacy of the pageview. We are just starting to see the emergence of startup publications that are seeing opportunity beyond the blog format. Included among the most prominent proponents of the written form are Medium, Atavist, Byliner, Longform, and Longreads."

For us, it means more quality reading, more places to write, and an appreciation for our good writing.

Read more here at Pando.