JOURNAL OF APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS 1987,20,379-380 NUMBER4 (WINTER 1987)

A THINKING AID
B. F. SKINNER
HARVARD 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 be
accurately placed as they appear. The outline grows with the paper. The construction of such an
outline is described.
DESCRIPTORS: old age, verbal behavior, thinking, work output

I used to say that I wrote and rewrote a paragraph
until I could "think it all at once." At times I have
felt that I could think a whole paper or chapter of
a book all at once. After finishing Beyond Freedom
and Dignity (1971), I took a short vacation during
which, without the manuscript, I wrote short sum-
maries of the chapters. When I came home, I added
them to the manuscript without checking their ac-
curacy. I felt that in them I was "thinking each
chapter all at once." That could not have been
literally true, of course, but I had organized the
material so tightly that I moved effortlessly from
one part to another as I thought it.
Something of the sort seems to happen in the
shaping of complex behavior, as in figure skating,
for example, or in responding to very complex
presentations, as in becoming familiar with a book,
painting, or piece of music. The first time we read,
say, The Brothers Karamazov, it consists of a
sequence of episodes. After reading it several times
we "know the book" in a different way. We see
how 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. When
we first see such a picture as Picasso's Guernica,
it is little more than a collection of parts. As we
become familiar with it, we see it as an organized
whole. When we first hear a symphony it is a
sequence of parts, but as we become familiar with
it, one part leads easily to another, variations reveal
Reprints may be obtained from B. F. Skinner, Department
of Psychology, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.
379
their common themes, and we eventually think of
it as some kind of single thing.
Recently, when writing a paper, I felt that I was
taking too much time to reach the point at which
I could "think a paragraph," let alone a whole
paper, at once. Age was no doubt relevant. Old
people forget things much more quickly than young
people do. In moving from one part of a paper to
another, might I not be carrying too little of it with
me and hence not accumulating as much of it as
a whole as I once did? I decided that something
must be done, and I built several prosthetic devices,
which have worked so well that I wish I had had
them when I was younger. Two of them are shown
in Figure 1.
I begin with a plastic panel-one side cut from
a three-ring binder, for example. I fasten cards (5
by 8 in.) on the panel, using short strips of masking
tape as hinges. I put the first card at the lower
right-hand corner of the panel with the red line
near the bottom, and add tape at the top edge.
The hinge holds the card more securely if a ballpoint
pen is run firmly along the tape at the edge of the
card. I put a second card slightly to the left, with
its lower edge on the red line of the first. Eight or
ten cards reach the left-hand edge of the panel. I
number the cards with a bold black pen and enter
descriptive tides on the exposed edges. When the
cards 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 of
each card slightly upward so that a fingernail lifts
it easily.
Before beginning a paper, I have usually col-
lected notes, clippings, references, and other ma-
380 B. F. SKINNER
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1
Ftn
Figure 1. A thinking aid.
terials. I group these in sections and put the sections
in some kind of order. I give each section a number
and assign it to a card. I enter subdivisions on each
section of the rest of the card and number them
decimally. As new material turns up, it is easy to
find a place for it on the appropriate card. When
a card becomes crowded I remove it (peeling the
tape from the panel) and put a fresh one in its
place. 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 few
seconds. If that is not enough to give me a "feel"
of the paper, I read some of the cards. As the paper
develops, it becomes obvious that gaps need to be
filled, that some sequiturs are non, that some parts
are in the wrong place, that some parts are in the
wrong paper, that some parts are too brief and need
to be lengthened and others too long and need to
be shortened. In this way I keep the paper, not "in
mind," but in front of me as a complex object on
which I am at work.
Most of this can be done before writing a sen-
tence but, of course, sentences begin to appear, and
sections are written. I collect them in a ring binder
with dividers corresponding to the cards on the
9
panel. I do not write the paper from beginning to
end; I work on any part of it that happens to be
especially interesting at the time. Slowly the paper
comes into existence. I could not have predicted
any of it when I started to write. I began with an
assigned subject matter, of course, and something
of what other writers had said about it may have
been important, but the thinking aid has given my
verbal and nonverbal histories the best chance to
make themselves felt. The paper has evolved. In
that 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 into
a briefcase or carry to the breakfast table or an easy
chair.
REFERENCES
Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyondfreedom and dignity. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Skinner, B. F. (1981). How to discover what you have to
say. The Behavior Analyst, 4, 1-7. Reprinted in Upon
further reflection. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Received May 19, 1987
Final acceptance July 6, 1987
Action Editor, Jon S. Bailey