CHAPTER 2: SCAFFOLDING AN OUTLINE

Use your world to outline a paper.

Chapter 1 introduced embodied cognition and argued you can take advantage of your world to help your writing. Chapter 2 provides a method for using your world to scaffold a detailed outline for a writing project. The method begins by generating potential topics for a paper, writing them on index cards, and putting the cards on display. By placing topics in your world you remove the need to keep the ideas inside your memory. You then manipulate the cards, seeking a sensible narrative. You also decompose broad topics into more specific topics, seeking ‘paragraph topics’ – topics specific enough to convey with a single paragraph. Chapter 2 describes how you convert paragraph topics into sentence pairs, producing a rich outline which makes completing your manuscript much easier. Chapter 2 also distinguishes my index card method from other systems which use index cards; the chapter ends by arguing the utility of index cards suggests different kinds of scaffolds for writing are worth exploring. Later chapters describe additional writing scaffolds.