Are Long-form Note-taking Tools Better than Outliners?

#1
#2

It is a good fortune we have both forms in TiddlyWiki. No need to switch your tool.
@saqimtiaz Strams lets us to use TW as an outliner.
The vanilla TiddlyWiki allows to take long form notes

and you can have both in the same document (TiddlyWiki).

When you are at a meeting, taking notes, streams help you a lot!

#3

And the streams fusion tool can convert a stream into a single tiddler.

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#4

Thanks for sharing.

One aspect I think the article misses is that you (or at least, I) sometimes start out with “free flow text” only to structure it later. For example, during a meeting it is just too distracting to have to bother with correct hierarch’ing, not to mention titles.

But of course, then we have the article Dave linked to which kind of nullifies your whole article :wink: Wow, this article: The End of Organizing

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#5
  • yes and during classes I am thinking about the class, not the ultimate organisation I will apply to the incoming content.
  • Fortunately tiddlywiki is very good at taking a block of text and structuring it with links to tiddlers with expanded content, using excise etc… and freelinks to identify tiddler titles in the text.
    • This is the intermediate between long-form and outline.

However unlike the full AI solution I believe we also could build additional smarts that tries to find and suggest what to do with given text, allowing even easier structuring of for example;

  • A single line/sentence ending with a Question “?” can become a question to be asked, an assertion ! (link to a reference)
  • A sentence containing verbs, to do words, could become todo items.
  • A sentence containing nouns, “names”, could become contact or reference items.
#6

Many of my tiddlers are derived from pdfs, online papers and also scanned paragraphs and pages from p-books (paper books :laughing:) so it would be more work on my part if I was to try and force a structure that the author had not intended. Also I have a fair amount of custom CSS which I have developed over time to ease the process of capturing each author’s style so rather than create uniformity I try and preserve some of the style of the author. My wife reads a kindle - I still prefer real paper books so
I guess the fact that I try and keep the author’s style is not a surprise - however when I sometimes seek the original source materiel from say a paragraph it is quite nice if the snippet and the full text have visual similarities and have the same ‘flow’.

So in my case the answer is partly preference but mostly because diverse source material may not lend itself to uniform structure or require extensive reworking.

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