1.8 Index Card Affordances
A writing scaffold must offer you appropriate affordances.
Why can index cards scaffold writing? To answer, consider another embodied concept: affordance. An affordance is a possible action the world offers an agent. An affordance depends upon an agent’s, and the world’s, physical properties (Gibson, 1979). Affordances “have to be measured relative to the animal. They are unique for that animal. They are not just abstract physical properties” (Gibson, 1979, p. 127, his italics). The same object offers different affordances to animals with different bodies because animal bodies dictate what actions an animal can perform. A doorknob offers ‘turnability’ to a human’s hand, but not to a cat’s paw.
A scaffold for writing replaces thinking with acting upon objects in the world (Shapiro, 2019). To aid writing, the scaffold must offer appropriate affordances. Consider the affordances offered to me by my preferred writing scaffold, 3” X 5” index cards.
Index cards offer ‘writability’. Most obviously, index cards offer ‘writability’: you can mark an index card’s surface with pen or pencil. Writability is crucial: to scaffold writing you must move your thoughts from your mind to your world. You do so when you jot notes on index cards.
Index cards offer ‘readability’. Once you write on an index card, you can later read what you wrote on the card. Combined, writability and readability permit index cards to replace your memory. When you jot an idea on an index card, you no longer need to keep it in memory. You do not retrieve information from memory; instead, you inspect a card and read its contents. The index card reduces memory demands, freeing cognitive resources for other tasks, such as evaluating ideas.
Index cards enforce ‘writing short’. An index card’s small size restricts how much you can write: conciseness arises because index cards offer little space for wordiness or eloquence. When you write topics on index cards you must write short (Clark, 2014). I often express an idea by jotting down a short phrase; I rarely write a complete sentence.
Being forced to write short helps a writer, particularly during a project’s early stages. When a project begins, you need to generate ideas or topics. Evaluating ideas as you generate them inhibits creativity (Osborn, 1948, 1953). If you express topics in sentences, you invite unwanted evaluation. Writers automatically evaluate their sentences, reducing creative flow (Elbow, 1981). Index cards encourage you to jot down short phrases, allowing you to elude premature evaluation.
Index cards offer ‘arrangeability’. Index cards offer more than writeability or readability. You can arrange index cards on a two-dimensional surface. For instance, in my lab I use magnets to attach index cards to a large whiteboard. I can work with cards by moving them around on the surface: by placing cards in a particular order or by grouping related cards closer together.
Arrangeability replaces more than your memory. Thinking about ideas becomes rearranging your index cards in the world. By moving cards around, you physically explore answers to various questions: What topic needs do you need to present first? Do some topics belong in one section while others belong in a second? Are some topics redundant? You change card positions to represent answers to such questions. You literally think when you move your cards around; you can see your thinking’s results when you examine index card positions in your display.
Index cards offer ‘groupability’. Writing projects usually have a hierarchical structure, reflected in different sections or chapters. Notes related to a writing project also tend to belong to different types: ideas or topics, sources to cite, quotations to include, and so on. You can use index card ‘arrangeability’ to represent such structure, for example by placing cards related to the same section closer together.
However, index cards have other properties to help represent related ideas. For instance, you can find different colored index cards. You can use different colored cards to represent different ideas. I usually write topic notes on white cards, but use pink cards for sources, green cards for quotes, blue cards for figures, and so on.
Using visual information like index card color makes relationships between different cards visually explicit. By looking at their colors, you can easily see different card types in your display. Visual ‘groupability’ also illustrates replacement, because you need not remember or think about relationships between ideas or between project components. Instead, you immediately see the relationships in your external display.
Index cards offer ‘portability’. Being small makes index cards extremely portable. I worked on the current chapter while on a family trip to Nova Scotia. I did not have room to pack my laptop in my carry-on baggage. Fortunately, I had room for index cards which I worked on during a long flight. Later, running low on blank cards, I easily found more to buy on my trip. Index card portability allows me to write anywhere.
Index cards offer ‘expendability’. Consider important writing advice originally offered by Sir Author Quiller-Couch: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings” (Quiller-Couch, 1916, pp. 234-235). You often must sacrifice ideas to improve your writing.
Index cards make discarding ideas easier. Index cards, being cheap and recyclable, are easy to throw away. When organizing ideas or topics into a narrative, you might find cards which don’t fit in. I can easily murder a card which does not fit in if I haven’t yet written sentences but instead have only jotted a short note on an index card. I simply toss the card into my recycle bin.
Index cards offer ‘cooperativity’. Your index card display exists in public; more than one person can view or manipulate the index cards at the same time. The scaffold makes a writing project available to everyone on a writing team.
Index cards offer ‘duality’. I sketch a scaffolding method for writing in the next section and describe it in detail in Chapter 2. The scaffold begins by writing broad topics on index cards and continues by converting broad topics into several, more specific, paragraph topics. With a satisfactory paragraph topic structure in place, you move away from jotting short notes (topics) to writing complete sentences. My method calls for writing the first and last sentence for each paragraph. Doing so takes advantage of the ‘duality’ offered by an index card: you can write on both of its sides. As you convert an organized set of topics into an organized chain of paragraphs, you use ‘duality’ by writing two sentences on the back of each paragraph’s index card. The next section briefly describes my scaffolding method. Chapter 2 details the scaffolding method’s logic.
Chapter 2 also explains differences between my methods and others which use index cards to outline (Atchity, 1995; Butler & Burroway, 2005). For instance, while the method described in Chapter 2 leans heavily on index cards, later chapters introduce different scaffolds, because if index cards can scaffold writing, then other objects can too. Beginning in Chapter 3 the book introduces additional scaffolds for academic writing.
Implications of Affordances. Affordances are crucial for embodied thinking. The thinking you can do depends upon what affordances the objects being manipulated offer you as you think with the world.
On the one hand, the affordances offered by index cards are particularly powerful (Krajewski & Krapp, 2011). Krajewski and Krapp trace the history of index cards from the 16th century use of paper slips to catalog library holdings to the 20th century use of card catalog systems by businesses. Krajewski and Krapp argue index card affordances (in particular, the ones I have called writability, readability, arrangeability and portability) provide index card catalogs all the information processing abilities of digital computers. As a result, they call card catalogs ‘paper machines’ and justify the 1929 Fortschritt GmbH’s (a catalog producer) claim “card catalogs can do anything” (Krajewski & Krapp, 2011, p. 1).
On the other hand, index cards do not offer every affordance. Other objects offer different affordances which alter the (embodied) thinking you can do with them. For example, In section 5.4.2 I argue computerized index card systems offer different affordances – affordances which, for me, make them less useful for writing.
