JOURNAL OF APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

A THINKING AID

B. F. SKINNERHARVARD UNIVERSITY

Writing a paper is often a process of discovering what you have to say. A small, inexpensive, "three-dimensional" outline of the paper is a help in guiding the process of discovery. New points can beaccurately placed as they appear. The outline grows with the paper. The construction of such anoutline is described.DESCRIPTORS: old age, verbal behavior, thinking, work output

I used to say that I wrote and rewrote a paragraphuntil I could "think it all at once." At times I havefelt that I could think a whole paper or chapter ofa book all at once. After finishing Beyond Freedomand Dignity (1971), I took a short vacation duringwhich, without the manuscript, I wrote short sum-maries of the chapters. When I came home, I addedthem to the manuscript without checking their ac-curacy. I felt that in them I was "thinking eachchapter all at once." That could not have beenliterally true, of course, but I had organized thematerial so tightly that I moved effortlessly fromone part to another as I thought it.

Something of the sort seems to happen in theshaping of complex behavior, as in figure skating,for example, or in responding to very complexpresentations, as in becoming familiar with a book,painting, or piece of music. The first time we read,say, The Brothers Karamazov, it consists of asequence of episodes. After reading it several timeswe "know the book" in a different way. We seehow its parts relate to each other and how consis-tently the characters behave. Dostoevsky himself,going over the manuscript many times, must have"thought it all at once" in a very special way. Whenwe first see such a picture as Picasso's Guernica,it is little more than a collection of parts. As webecome familiar with it, we see it as an organizedwhole. When we first hear a symphony it is asequence of parts, but as we become familiar withit, one part leads easily to another, variations reveal

Reprints may be obtained from B. F. Skinner, Departmentof Psychology, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street,Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.

their common themes, and we eventually think ofit as some kind of single thing.

Recently, when writing a paper, I felt that I wastaking too much time to reach the point at whichI could "think a paragraph," let alone a wholepaper, at once. Age was no doubt relevant. Oldpeople forget things much more quickly than youngpeople do. In moving from one part of a paper toanother, might I not be carrying too little of it withme and hence not accumulating as much of it asa whole as I once did? I decided that somethingmust be done, and I built several prosthetic devices,which have worked so well that I wish I had hadthem when I was younger. Two of them are shownin Figure 1.

I begin with a plastic panel-one side cut froma three-ring binder, for example. I fasten cards (5by 8 in.) on the panel, using short strips ofmaskingtape as hinges. I put the first card at the lowerright-hand corner of the panel with the red linenear the bottom, and add tape at the top edge.The hinge holds the card more securely ifa ballpointpen is run firmly along the tape at the edge of thecard. I put a second card slightly to the left, withits lower edge on the red line of the first. Eight orten cards reach the left-hand edge of the panel. Inumber the cards with a bold black pen and enterdescriptive tides on the exposed edges. When thecards are opened, as in the panel at the right,numbers and titles are also entered along the ex-posed edges. I bend the lower left-hand corner ofeach card slightly upward so that a fingernail liftsit easily.

Before beginning a paper, I have usually col-lected notes, clippings, references, and other ma-

379

1987,20,379-380 NUMBER4 (WINTER 1987)

380 B. F. SKINNER

.- 9

F1tn

Figure 1. A thinking aid.

terials. I group these in sections and put the sectionsin some kind of order. I give each section a numberand assign it to a card. I enter subdivisions on eachsection of the rest of the card and number themdecimally. As new material turns up, it is easy tofind a place for it on the appropriate card. Whena card becomes crowded I remove it (peeling thetape from the panel) and put a fresh one in itsplace. As better orders appear, I rearrange the cards.When I sit down to work on a paper in progress,

I first read the exposed entries-a matter of a fewseconds. If that is not enough to give me a "feel"of the paper, I read some of the cards. As the paperdevelops, it becomes obvious that gaps need to befilled, that some sequiturs are non, that some partsare in the wrong place, that some parts are in thewrong paper, that some parts are too briefand needto be lengthened and others too long and need tobe shortened. In this way I keep the paper, not "inmind," but in front of me as a complex object onwhich I am at work.

Most of this can be done before writing a sen-tence but, of course, sentences begin to appear, andsections are written. I collect them in a ring binderwith dividers corresponding to the cards on the

panel. I do not write the paper from beginning toend; I work on any part of it that happens to beespecially interesting at the time. Slowly the papercomes into existence. I could not have predictedany of it when I started to write. I began with anassigned subject matter, of course, and somethingof what other writers had said about it may havebeen important, but the thinking aid has given myverbal and nonverbal histories the best chance tomake themselves felt. The paper has evolved. Inthat sense I have discovered what I had to say(Skinner, 1981).

Something of the sort can be done with a com-puter, of course, but the panel is easier to slip intoa briefcase or carry to the breakfast table or an easychair.

REFERENCES

Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyondfreedom and dignity. NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf.

Skinner, B. F. (1981). How to discover what you have tosay. The Behavior Analyst, 4, 1-7. Reprinted in Uponfurther reflection. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Received May 19, 1987Final acceptance July 6, 1987Action Editor, Jon S. Bailey