Use Electronic Mind Mapping for Content Creation
Electronic mind mapping techniques help you organize your thoughts in an outline before assembling them in a document. For visual learners, mind maps offer an overview of how a document might be put together. You can move thoughts around before you commit them to paragraphs. You can share the mind map with team members and get additional perspectives. Use electronic mind mapping to improve your content and save time in the process.
I wrote a post earlier on mind mapping. In that post, I downplayed the usefulness of electronic tools. Since then I have evaluated several tools and found one of them easy to use and very helpful. I particularly like Mindmup at mindmup.com It is intuitive, yet very powerful. It allows components to be moved around in the diagram without re-typing. And, it is free.
I developed the mind map above for an article about building a website. While I haven’t written the article, it will be 1200 words or more. I moved topics around by detaching them from one section and moving to another. I changed the wording of topics as I thought further about building a website. When I get ready to write the article, I will likely share it with one of my mentors and ask for her comments and suggestions.
Electronic Mind Mapping has several other useful features
- You can document thoughts for each bubble as they occur to you. If there are thoughts included in the bubble, a small notepad will appear. If you double click it, the ideas will appear.
- You can create a document with (or without) the bubble title included.
- Create a storyboard from the mind map by selecting Show Storyboard, and a storyboard will appear on the right half of the screen. You can modify the storyboard as you please. When finished it can be exported to a Google Docs file if you are creating an article or to PowerPoint if you are working on a slide deck.
- And there are many other time-saving features. Refer to the Mindmup website for more information.
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