Page 9 - Writing Moves Digital Toolbox

Purpose Digital
Drafting, Collaborating, and Managing Content Toolbox
Section 1
As you move back and forth from generating ideas to the drafting phase, there is an abundance of writing
tools available to you. Here we'll consider both tools that can serve multiple purposes for readers and writers Sidenote
and those that are particularly useful for content management and collaboration.
Similar content
Using Multipurpose Document Tools management tools
we’ve mentioned in
Multipurpose document tools make it easy to create, share, and comment on drafts. Not only do they often this book are Diigo and
provide an online tool for word processing, they may combine this with tools for annotating, doing research, Zotero.
gathering sources, and collaborating with others. Applications like Evernote and OneNote are all-purpose
tools for drafting, collaborating, and managing content. We can think of them as digital equivalents to the old
Trapper Keeper—a notebook that holds several other notebooks where individuals can store and organize
notes, readings, and other content. Google Docs and Dropbox, on the other hand, are more suited for file
sharing and working collaboratively on writing and group projects. Because the need for such tools continues
to grow as more content and information is produced, we find several similarities in the design and function-
ality across these kinds of applications.

The

DESIGN OF MULTIPURPOSE DOCUMENT TOOLS

Multipurpose document tools combine multiple functions that are useful to writers, including the following.

• Note taking. Being able to take notes online, in digital spaces and with digital texts, is a central func-
tion of content management applications like Evernote. By making note taking easy online, writers can
take advantage of the ease of note taking during the research and drafting process while writing a text.

• Content. Such tools allow users to take and save screenshots, save images from users’ phones, book-
mark websites or web pages, and record audio files, essentially serving as a single tool for creating
content and for organizing and working with this content.

• Annotation. As we noted about reading online, in addition to capturing content, these tools help users
engage with their content through annotation, enabling users to take notes on the content they have
collected, highlight important information, and make notes directly on a digital resource.

• Tagging and search functions. In the process of gathering content, these tools help users organize
content through creating tags based on key words and categories, so the content is more searchable
within the application. Consistent tagging is an important step in being able to group and find specific
information across resources and content.

• Notebook creation. All such applications allow you to create notebooks to separate out different
projects and related content in specific sections.

• Collaborating/sharing. Of course, one of the central design functions of such tools is to allow for
a high level of collaboration and sharing with others. Notes, notebooks, and content can be shared
online. Documents can be composed together and commented upon. And as these tools change and
evolve, many are now incorporating instant messaging and video chat for real-time collaboration.

• Access and syncing across devices (cloud based). As cloud-based technologies, content manage-
ment applications can be accessed any time you are online, from any device. Work you do on one
device can be synced to update across devices.