By personal preference I rarely do topical studies, but as chance (or the Holy Spirit) would have it, I am doing two, one right after another. The first study was easily centered around a couple of words and I basically used my standard Word Study format (Although I collected pertinent commentary in a singe clippings file). But the second centers on concepts that doesn't lend itself to that, so clippings to the rescue.
As a starting point, I opened all the bible/topical dictionaries in my library and cycled through them one at a time, searching them for the 6-8 words that I came up with to define my study, each time I had a hit, I would just put the content into a clipping file. Now, I can start parsing that files, reading each of the clipped features, reading the references and start to build a note file with words, concepts and passages that define the topic. Once I have those collected/collated I will then have a pretty good idea on how to present that information to the class.
How do you use clippings?
