Essay Organization.

I have recently been told by another student about an interesting tool that is useful for organizing research and ideas. It is a mind-mapping program, which works on the notion of taking one central idea, and linking other ideas from it, and linking related ideas off of those. I don't know the psychology behind it, but I have now been using it for about two days, and it really helps me organize my research material.

I am writing a paper on Revelation 10, and what I usually do is to read my sources, and take notes on them in one Word document, which keeps it all in one place, but means that I have to scroll around every time I want to compare different sources on the same issue. With this program, I can group all of the issues together, and branch out the different sources, and so keep them organized.

The only thing is that I have not yet written a paper using this research method, so I don't know how well it will work for consolidating everything into a final product, but for now I do not foresee any problems.

The program is called FreeMind, and can be downloaded here.

Examples:

This is the basic map I am working with:



And this is it in all its branched-out glory: