How did I make the transition from writing blog posts to a book author? Initially I was writing only 'How-To' articles that focused on helping the reader get a specific result. Over time, as I wrote more I gained more confidence and I was able to write more articles in less time. However, writing a book is more involved than writing blog posts. I am not a native English speaker. It pushed me beyond my writing abilities. Since I did not have any training in writing, I searched for resources on how to write technical books. I had to learn some techniques that helped me write the book during the time I worked on the TDD in Ruby book. Today, I am going to share with you one of the techniques that I learned during the time I wrote the book. I had the main bullet points and I used Semantic Maps to expand the main points to a paragraph.
Semantic maps are webs of words. The purpose of creating a map is to visually display the meaning-based connections between a word or phrase and a set of related words or concepts.
I would take the main point, research the topic and draw the semantic map that connects all the concepts. I would then eliminate the concepts that are not relevant to the analogy that I need to explain the main idea. I revised the diagram over the course of few days. Then I write a paragraph by referring the semantic map. I revise the paragraph several times. I keep all the paragraphs next to each other so that I can compare and finally pick the one that I am satisfied with.
The following diagram shows the semantic map for the music analogy that I used in the book. The music-semantic-map-1 shows how the music is related to other concepts. The concepts are connected by arrows and the relationship is written next to the arrows. The music-semantic-map-2 is the continuation of the map that connects the Performer to musical instruments.
I also drew semantic maps for programming as shown in program-semantic-map-0 and program-semantic-map. I compare the semantic maps that captures the essence of creating music with creating computer programs, I look for things that are similar to make the analogy clear.
Comparison of semantic maps helps us to find missing concepts in the paragraph that expands the main idea. I found semantic maps very helpful because I don't need to worry about grammar when I am drawing them. The main focus is in finding the essential relationships between the concepts. Once I nailed the relationships between the concepts then I worry about the grammar and the sequence of the sentences to form a paragraph. The TDD in Ruby book is written to be practical introduction TDD for Ruby developers. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.
