Ian Campbell felt he had been wasting a lot of time for years. He liked managing his own portfolio; but was tired of wading through the quagmire of data that confronts anyone trying to work their way through the maze of blogs, newsletters, sites, and various information regarding stocks and equities.
It just wasn't working. This troubled Campbell, who for thirty-five years has been viewed as a leading Canadian expert in the rendering of independent business valuation opinions in substantive Canadian public and private company shareholder disputes and company valuations. He wrote the definitive Canadian books that are broadly used by Canadian professionals and others.
For several years, with the assistance of three investment advisors, each of whom specialize in different industry groups, Ian has researched macro-economic concepts and investment ideas online. He consistently spent more time doing this than he believed should be necessary. At the same time he had to develop financial and market comparators that he could not readily find in one organized place.
Campbell then considered what he had learned in his years of helping clients determine the value of their companies and investments. He concluded that if the most pertinent data was consistently summarized across a focused group of companies, and focused due diligence techniques were applied to those companies in much the way a company acquirer might do, this should lead to considerable time efficiencies and importantly, to a more in-depth knowledge of the companies.
The result, after nearly one year of research and site-building, is a unique site, recently launched in December.
He was especially interested in the 'due diligence' aspect. This was used to get to the heart of the financial matters of these publicly-traded Canadian Junior Mining and Oil & Gas Industries. Campbell and his team developed a patent-pending 'due diligence' questionnaire that includes more than 200 questions organized by three dozen topical headings.
The questionnaire searches company documents by keywords. Search responses are linked to company documents enabling site members to link directly to that response as it appears in the company document. Later, a special search-report is available for the member's review and follow-up.
Members have an opportunity to quickly and systematically learn a great deal about an individual company without having first to read voluminous corporate documents
Now here is where I think it really gets interesting. Members quickly learn what the company has not disclosed that may be important to their own work. All questions that do not yield a response to the special key words and phrases search are reproduced in an abbreviated 'follow-up questionnaire'. Often the questions that weren't answered are as ' if not more ' important as those that were.
It has taken nearly one year of hard work to find out what the indivfidual investor and the Investment Advisers wanted; then to organize it in one place so they could find what they need and make their own investment decisions. So far, it looks like Campbell has hit the nail right...on the head.
In this article I'm going to discuss the "index card method" of writing. If you haven't ever tried it, you should know that using index cards to write is a very good and useful way to get the job done. It's easy once you get the basic idea, and if you practice it regularly you'll be able to produce better results and faster results on a consistent basis.
For the purpose of this article, an "index card" is the little 3x5 or 4x6 lined paper card that you can purchase at your local office supply store. They provide just enough room to write some notes but not so much to let you go off on a tangent!
Now for the methodology...
You'll need quite a few index cards on hand. You'll need anywhere from 50 to 500 depending on the size of your book.
Step 1 is to get your notes onto the cards. Go through your sources, your thoughts, your notes, and write a little bit of text for each topic on each index card. The more detailed you are, the better... but you don't want to over-do it. If you find yourself needing to turn the card over and write on the back you're probably getting carried away.
Once you have moved all of your project-related notes onto the index cards, you sift through the cards and start categorizing and organizing them. Break them up into groups of related topics. It's easiest just to create a few stacks and sort through them on your kitchen table or a similar surface.
The next step is to start to organize each individual stack into an order that "works". This is the point where you need to consider the FLOW of your story, and how the order of events in your writing is going to affect your audience.
Finally, once you have ordered each individual stack, you need to sort them into order from beginning to end. I usually like to think of each stack as a chapter or section of the book. Depending on how you've worked up until this point, the precise divisions and the meaning of a group of cards might be different for you.
Now you have your complete project in a collection of ordered, organized index cards. This is the point at which you begin the traditional "writing" process, of actually typing the manuscript using your index cards as a guide. I would not sit down with the whole stack of cards at once, but would instead use "divide and conquer" to tackle one group at a time, and in each group take things one card at a time.
You'll probably find at this stage that the writing process itself becomes more of a process of copying from the cards, paraphrasing, and "gluing" things together. If you have followed these steps faithfully to this point, your project will probably start to seem like it's writing itself! The only thing left to do at this point is to focus on style and form, and making your writing flow together well.
To review, for this method to work, you need to take the following simple steps:
1. Transfer your thoughts and notes to index cards
2. Categorize the cards into stacks of cards that can be grouped together based on topic, etc.
3. Order the cards in each group into an order that makes sense
4. Order the groups themselves into an order that makes sense
5. Write your first draft straight from the cards, "gluing" things together here and there where necessary.
If you practice this method faithfully, you'll probably find that it takes the difficult parts of writing and simplifies them, and allows you to spend more time on the parts of writing that you enjoy.
Both Roy Macnaughton & Brian Vogt are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Roy Macnaughton has sinced written about articles on various topics from Finances, Stock and Finances. You can learn more about this transparent, time-saving site at: Roy Mac. Roy Macnaughton's top article generates over 18100 views. to your Favourites.
Brian Vogt has sinced written about articles on various topics from Parenting, Stock and Writing. Brian Vogt is an author, programmer, entrepreneur, and the creator of the unique software for writers that was created specifically for this method of writing. To learn more about his software for writers, visit the. Brian Vogt's top article generates over 9900 views. to your Favourites.