How to storyboard complex documents using mind mapping software

Storyboards (as defined by Wikipedia) are a series of illustrations displayed in sequence for the purpose of previsualizing an animated or live-action film. In recent year, businesses have adapted them as a means to plan ad campaigns, visualize business processes and many other applications. So it's not surprising that mind mapping software can be used to help businesspeople to "storyboard" complex documents and reports.

The Benefits of Storyboarding

The benefits of storyboarding are straightforward:

• They help you guarantee that the information you present will eventually lead you to your goals.
• They help you order the information that you're going to present and they make it easier for you to determine what you're going to do and when you're going to do it.
• A storyboard also makes it easy to start planning your project- all of the boxes on the storyboard are going to need to go into the project and so all you have to do is figure out how to spread them throughout a PowerPoint presentation.
• They save you time by eliminating guesswork.

Lay Out the Primary Topics

Take you "big picture" items and string them out horizontally first - these are your primary topics and you're going to want to use these as the foundation for your storyboard. Here's an example:

3. Start Fleshing Out Individual Topics

Take your initial list of big picture topics and then start fleshing out each one of them individually. In this example it shows the flesing out the first two topics.

Take your initial list of big picture topics and then start fleshing out each one of them individually. In this example I've fleshed out the first two topics.

4. Flesh it Out Until You're Done

Just flesh out everything until you reach the end of the line.

The Mind Map

mind-mapping has spawned a cottage industry of software that will take your thoughts and provide a visual display of relationships between ideas and where the linkages are. It’s sort of like a 3-D list.

Storyboarding

Taking that concept one step further is using storyboards to structure one’s writing. Borrowed from the world of filmmaking, storyboards force you to do several things with your writing:

¨ You have to determine a story arc to your material

¨ You have to be explicit about what point of view you are using in your writing, and how and why you shift it during the story

¨ You need to conceive of anecdotes or reportage as scenes, with a beginning, middle and end, that serve to drive the larger story forward

¨ You have to pay attention to the visual and kinesthetic elements of the scenes you are recounting

Wordle/Tag Clouds

One tool that can help you see patterns in your research is the concept of the tag cloud, which provides a visual representation of the frequency of words or topics in a given piece of writing. Popularized by blogs, tag clouds can be an aid to a user’s search of a site—if a tag that matches their search is big enough, they may be enticed deeper into an online site.

For those of you unfamiliar with tag clouds, here’s one

Wordle is another interesting tool for finding patterns or repeating elements in your writing. It creates word clouds that look and function much the same as tag clouds.

Here’s an image via Wordle that was created from a newsletter article about persistence and creativity.

My suggestion for using Wordle to structure your story is to do a free-form brain dump on your material, up to 500 words long, then drop the piece into Wordle and see what patterns emerge.