Persisting the fractal: outlining as a learning tool
Blank page panic, a form of cognitive resistance and unease that occasionally hits the writer when he must start working, has an equal but opposite analogous. We may call it the full page panic. It kicks in when we approach a page overflowing with words, riddled with notions, bursting with information.
A lot of intellectual work is ahead of us, and we feel overwhelmed. Especially when it comes to complex passages, we need to come up with a strategic approach to the task of understanding.
Reassembling meaning
We can envision the basic building block of knowledge as a piece of text that is insightful enough to convey meaningful and distinctive information. But this excerpt doesn't exist in a vacuum — on the contrary; it exists in the context of the document.
A surprisingly big part of getting to understand a text has to do with correctly parsing propositional junctions and the mesh of meaning they grammatically form. When studying a document and identifying such logic links, we may feel the urge to annotate them on paper. We need a conceptual structure that allows us to encapsulate the relationship we discover between each informative bit and the others.
We will be establishing kinships between concepts. Each node of our structure will be interconnected to their parent or child, except for the title, which has no superior links. It is the primary node from which everything else branches off: a root.
The structure we have been building must resemble a quite familiar shape. It should be clear, at this point, that we were reverse-engineering the tree diagram all along.
Outlining — Rule and form
Tree diagrams are conceptual objects we encounter in many different fields of learning. They are pervasive in computer science: binary trees are data structures allowing to efficiently execute operations such as research, insert and deletion of elements. Furthermore, our operating system directory structure, as well as HTML files, are represented and interpreted as tree structures.
Library classification systems like Dewey Decimal conceptually rely on tree diagrams for establishing their nomenclature. Tree diagrams are used by transformational grammar theorists to describe a given language's syntax; they are also especially good at expressing managerial hierarchies, taxonomic knowledge, family, evolutionary trees, and many other types of information.
When handling these structures, precision is all: nodes have to be meticulously arranged and significantly networked. But in everyday life, our attempts at recreating hierarchies can afford a lesser degree of rigour than, say, a standardized browser interface.
Defining a visual layout for our concepts is a thinking tool, not a matter of theoretical accuracy. We may simplify our tree of knowledge into a more handy and versatile conceptual object: the outline.
Outlines are schematic documents used to express the hierarchical relationship between entities. They are quite similar to tree diagrams — one might informally argue that the difference between an outline and a tree structure is the same that exists between a bordered and a borderless table.
The outline can implement typographic expedients other than lines to highlight the relationship between concepts and better differentiate them. Roman, Arabic numerals, letters and a variety of symbols are used to enumerate the outline items in a poignant order.
Alternatively, the structure can be completely naked — the expression of the hierarchic relationships demanded to blank space only. This is known as a bare outline.
Outlines are wide-spread in academic and authorial settings as a tool for mentally organizing one's writing before the first drafting it. It helps to envision the skeleton of the textual document, its paragraphs and their order of exposition, its main argumentation points and the logical passages in-between. It helps to ascertain that the piece is harmonic in its composition and coherent in all its parts.
Its ability to summarize, simplify and organize concepts make the outline a powerful instrument to enhance thinking coherence and reach greater clarity of exposition.
For the same reason, outlining can be of great use when organizing notes, recaps and reinterpretations of existing knowledge.
Outlines are able to clearly convey relationships between conceptual entities, hence helping us in the intricated endeavour of figuring them out, memorizing them, and regurgitating them in the future.
Persisting the fractal
The splitting of knowledge into simpler, affiliated bits is a Sisyphean task with a meditative quality to it. It is an iterated, hypnotic effort: it can go on forever. The outline that results from this operation develops recursively: it may as well be an infinite object, like a fractal.
Fractals' main attribute is their unfolding symmetry: they scale by iterating infinitely self-similar patterns. They can be chopped up in hundreds of pieces, each of which will show an astounding similarity to the intact starting point.
But categorizing too much can be dangerous. We might end up losing our learning goals while compulsively cataloguing our thoughts, and rapidly dissipating our mental energies. As a matter of fact, the informative fractal structure we described might look impossible to fathom and to govern. Yet, if wisely approached, it unlocks a handy thinking aid.
Outlining is the same as writing a telephone number down from our operative memory.
We pour the immediate, evanescent outcome of our logical thinking about the information at hand in a quick, meaningful doodle, thus fixating our work on text for later use.
As a thinking tool, the outline works by offloading the cognitive work of having to remember the logical structure of the learning material while we are still working on it.
The circular, generative task of outlining liberates mental resources that we can allocate to another complicated and inherently human task, that of understanding.