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Hi everybody,

During the latest weeks I've been preparing an exam. I had to collect information from several sources, in addition to writing my own thoughts, and after years away from the university I had to find the best modern tool to do this.

My first idea was to use Circus Ponies NoteBook to collect everything. Someone else could have suggested me to use DEVONThink, or the like. What I didn't like of this solution, was that I was not only collecting, but had also to shape a single paper for the exam. These programs are strong for taking single notes, but not for structured documents.

I then went to Scrivener, that is a mix of a data repository and a structured writing tool. I use it on a regular basis to write articles and tales, so it was an obvious first choice. It worked great to shape the paper, but I met the first problems when I had to also start using footnotes. Not that you can't add them, but since they are inline notes, they are going to look a bit odd, when they are rather long.

My thought went to the outlining feature of the recent wordprocessors. Both Mellel and Nisus Writer Pro include a powerful outliner. This makes easy not only structuring a document before you start to actually write, but since you can move entire blocks from the Navigator, you can easily shape the paper as long as you go on writing it. And you can always see the general picture of your document.

It worked great. While I used the outliner in Word 5.1a during my former study career, this function has greatly improved with the new wordprocessors, and makes taking notes while writing your paper really comfortable.

Paolo

Generally, I use OmniOutliner (Pro) for preparing exam papers and tests. Actually, I keep a general OOP file of all the questions I think up as, in what I have to teach here in China, there are only so many questions you can ask anyway, and then I mark an appropriate number of them for export to RTF. I then pull the RTF into an exam template I have set up in NWP and format, polish and make any changes I want to in that. As I keep an archive of previous years' exams, it is not difficult to ensure the new one is not a duplicate of a previous year's, and also I set up my papers so that the students answer on the paper itself and do not retain it. Here in China, it would only take a couple of years and the student body would have built up their own repository of possible questions and just memorise those, rather than actually paying attention in lectures and reading the materials.

OOP is, of course, a very powerful outliner, and so setting up the overall plan, re-ordering questions or multiple-choice answers is very easy.

Mark

Now that the exam has passed, I can return to this issue. I admit I used NWP exclusively, because of the particular nature of Italian university, where tests are only oral and not written. So, my "paper" was a series of personal notes, not an actual paper.

Otherwise, as Xiamese suggests, I should have done my researches mainly into a dedicated outliner/repository application. I would have gone with NoteBook, that I'm already using for planning and collecting clips. Finally, I would have shaped the clips into a somewhat significant order right in NoteBook, and then exported everything meaningful into NWP for actually wiring my paper.

Keeping the two phases (research and writing) separate would have helped keeping my mind cleaner.

Paolo