Inspiration® - Example of a Planning Tool

In Chapter 5, our discussion of word processing and the writing process mentions the use of additional toolsthat assist writers in various ways (checking spelling, thesaurus, etc.). In our review of such tools, we mention how outlining tools can be used in planning and organizing a writing project.

Inspiration® from Inspiration Software, Inc., would be an example of a planning tool. This program allows individuals or a group to brain storm and organize ideas in multiple formats; outline or graphical. Pictures and notes can be incorporated to extend the content of either format.

We purposefully try to use technology tools we encounter in our own work as a way to gain some personal insights into how such tools might be useful to others. When we first loaded Inspiration, we happened to be writing about the operation of school-based web servers and attempted to use the planning tool to "sketch out" the factors we felt should influence the content appearing on school web sites.

Inspiration allows work to be exported in a variety of formats and one of the formats happened to be HTML. We created the following examples of an outline and a graphical view using this export feature. Other export options allow work to be saved in a file that can be loaded by different word processing programs. The idea is to create an outline in Inspiration (which is designed for the purposes of planning and organizing) and then complete the writing project with a word processing program (which is more appropriate to text input and manipulation).

Example of Graphical Representation

Example of Outline