When you first start on a writing project you don’t know what the structure of your project will be. As you do research, collect ideas, and clarify your thoughts, the structure will emerge.
Using a tool like Tinderbox lets you test your ideas and see what kind of structure provides the best fit for your ideas.
The process of writing something down and re-reading it can help you clarify your thinking. Upon reflection you might find that your note is unclear or inaccurate. Or you might decide that your mental model of the problem needs correction.
Seeing your idea represented in words, or in relation to other ideas, can help clarify the way you think about it.
And when you’re reading a particular source or thinking about a particular subject, it’s interesting now, but you don’t know how it’s going to fit into the big picture. You don’t know what the big answer is going to be. And so you need to work around. You need to work to figure out how the information actually matters to you. We call this emergent information; emergent structure. You don’t know in advance how everything fits together. That’s, in fact, the most important thing a student or a researcher needs to discover in the course of their work.
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The Japanese hypertext scholar Kumiyo Nakakoji talks about amplified representational talkback, which is a general design phenomenon. An architect, an artist, or a writer puts something on paper and then looks at it. You look at it, and then it seems different from what you had in mind, and you either correct what you’ve written, or you see that what you’ve written is right and correct your bad idea. That kind of representational talkback is fundamental to all sorts of all creative processes, from the sciences to the arts.
SOURCE Mark Bernstein with Jorge Arrango, podcast: The Informed Life Episode 99
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In the same way that a suit off the rack won’t fit as well as a tailor made outfit, Imposed structure hinders thinking
