The Last Word
It's hard to start writing until you've planned a structure.
A good starting point here is Mind
Manager. This software can really help
unlock your creativity, by letting you plan your project visually through
ideas radiating out from a central core. It's a spatial rather than
linear approach, creating a "mind map" that's proven to
be a highly effective learning and retention tool.
Locating the literature
references you need to back up your research is of course crucial, and
that's
where a bibliographic reference management package is all but essential.
EndNote and Reference
Manager are two of the best; whichever you choose,
you'll
be able to use it to search Internet-based libraries of references, download
and organise those you need to cite, and create perfectly formatted bibliographies
in Word as you work.
If there's a downside to programs like these,
it's that they can
locate such a wealth of literature references that it's hard to identify
which are the most relevant to your research. Instead of ploughing your
way through hundreds of abstracts, you can get help from an innovative
tool called RefViz. This is a powerful text analysis package that gives
you a visual overview of a collection of references based on content,
so you can tell at a glance which come closest to the keywords that are
most relevant to your work, and see trends and associations. From the
developers of EndNote and Reference
Manager, RefViz can be linked to
either.
There are
so many resources on the Web these days that you also need a tool to
manage that mass of unstructured data - Web pages and bookmarks,
PDFs, emails etc - that can contribute to your research. Onfolio is
just such a tool, and once you've used it, you'll wonder how
you ever managed without; it's described in more detail on page 6.
So
what else can you add to Word to make your research writing easier? An
essential tool if you use a lot of equations is MathType, the full version
of Word's
Equation Editor that offers a great deal of extra functionality. And
if your publisher demands you submit in LaTeX format, you can avoid the
hassle of a separate application by using Word2TeX, which adds a range
of TeX-based output options to Word's Save As menu. |
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