[HN Gopher] How I learned to stop worrying and structure all wri...
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How I learned to stop worrying and structure all writing as a list
Author : Naac
Score : 186 points
Date : 2022-03-18 18:31 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dynomight.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dynomight.net)
| andreshb wrote:
| Lists make writing easier
|
| 1. I write ideas without worrying about transitions
|
| 2. I can quickly review if I'm missing any important point
|
| 3. Forces me to simplify what I try to communicate with less
| words and more meaning
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| If you're making a list, you still need to pay attention to the
| order of your list and how things flow from item to item.
| You're still doing transitions.
| gowld wrote:
| Next step, multiple/nested lists:
|
| * Pros: * starts as a list * gradual
| enhancement
|
| * Cons: \* interior items lead to excessive
| depth * loses horizontal space *
| crashes space shuttles
|
| * each transition type needs another list
|
| Interesting:
|
| * This is a metalist.
| jbmny wrote:
| I really am starting to feel like any writing I do that is not
| intended to be read by others should be in list form. When
| writing prose, I often catch myself worrying about "meta"
| things that have nothing to do with the ideas I'm trying to
| convey: phrasing, rhythm, vocabulary, etc. I feel it's just
| impossible to write prose without worrying about this stuff.
| It's like I'm always trying to impress someone with my writing.
| I think there's a time and place for that, but not when the
| only audience is me.
| jerf wrote:
| I absolutely agree that any writing much past one normal
| monitor's worth of writing could use more structure than just a
| pile of paragraphs. (Though a pile of paragraphs is still much
| better than a pile of sentences!)
|
| But it is a strange leap from "Too much writing without more
| structure is hard to read" to "You should use lists
| specifically". It's perfectly valid to use, you know, headers.
| Subheaders. Actual lists, bulleted and ordered. Horizontal rules
| if you're feeling feisty and/or old school. Essayist does try to
| give motivations but I feel like there was significant cheating
| by comparing lists to unstructured essays. Lists vs. structured
| essays are a much more give & take situation, where lists only
| triumph in certain limited ways.
| morninglight wrote:
| Perhaps the best example is a free instructional document
| developed by the US government at an enormous cost over nearly 90
| years. Adopting this writing style allows even the most complex
| subjects to be mastered by any high school graduate. The
| downloadable free style guide for conveying technical information
| in a clear and concise manner can be found here:
| https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf
| feoren wrote:
| LOL government bad. Taxes, amiright? Guys? Guys?
| yodon wrote:
| If you're leaning towards stripping all your writing down to list
| form, you may want to read Tufte's analysis on the role
| PowerPoint (aka writing everything in the form of bulleted lists)
| played in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster [0]. I used to
| write exclusively in bulleted list/outline format until spending
| time with Tufte's analysis. Now I get that the connective tissue
| of the document is vitally important to the reader even if it's
| not important to the writer. If you don't put in the connective
| tissue, your reader has to do it for you and they'll probably do
| it incorrectly (leading to, for example, the failure to prevent
| the Challenger disaster).
|
| [0]https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/..
| .
| kqr wrote:
| There is one important difference between written lists and
| PowerPoint presented lists. IIRC Tufte emphasises this
| difference too.
|
| A written list can be read in any order. You can go back and
| re-read previous items, and then go into the future and see
| what the conclusions from the current items are, and so on.
| This free-form temporal flow of any writing (including lists)
| is a very powerful tool of reasoning. Arguably, this property
| of writing is what leads to an intellectual explosion once a
| people learns how to write.
|
| In a PowerPoint presentation, the temporal order is fixed. And
| humans have a tendency to infer causality based on order. So
| with a PowerPoint presentation, you can (more easily) convince
| someone of invalid conclusions of logic because you control the
| post hoc ergo propter hoc.
|
| So, I guess, all of this to say: writing lists good.
| PowerPointing lists bad.
| delusional wrote:
| Hmm. Tufte does note that one of PPs specific ailments is the
| linear nature of the presentation, but he also goes directly
| for bulleted lists. He pretty clearly takes down deeply
| indented bulleted lists as the internal structure of "The
| Software Bureaucracy" leaking out through the software.
|
| I think the salient argument is his argument that the CONTENT
| should drive the presentation style. Lists are good for some
| stuff, but not everything.
| rattray wrote:
| That's a good argument against one-sentence lists, but the
| author seems to be arguing in favor of numbered headlines (with
| paragraphs in between).
| bckr wrote:
| The thing is, this article doesn't really advocate for
| stripping everything down to bullet points.
|
| All of the examples are clearly written in paragraph form, but
| there are nice, big section headers that would clearly
| delineate the subtopics within the example.
|
| In other words, the title is misleading. A more accurate title
| might be: "I learned to stop worrying and give all my essays
| clear sub-headings".
| pengaru wrote:
| > you may want to read Tufte's analysis on the role PowerPoint
| (aka writing everything in the form of bulleted lists) played
| in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster [0].
|
| Nit: PowerPoint didn't even exist when Challenger exploded
| (o-ring failure), you must be referring to Columbia (heat-
| shield failure).
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Harvard Graphics Forever
| tveyben wrote:
| Ha - i used that, both v2 and v3 IIRC ;-) Nice to be
| reminded about that product ;-)
| gowld wrote:
| From the link:
|
| > Richard Feynman had also experienced the bullet-outline
| format style of NASA in his service on the commission that
| investigated the first shuttle accident, the Challenger in
| 1986. Feynman wrote:
|
| >> Then we learned about "bullets"--little black circles in
| front of phrases that were supposed to summarize things.
| There was one after another of these little goddamn bullets
| in our briefing books and on slides.
|
| but Columbia is discussed in much more depth.
|
| And to be clear, re lists/bullets, Tufte's complaint was
| about 4+ levels of nested bullets:
|
| > At the same time, lower-level NASA engineers were writing
| about the possible danger to the Columbia in several hundred
| e-mails (with the Boeing reports in PP format sometimes
| attached). The text of 90% of these e-mails simply used
| paragraphs and sentences; 10% used bullet lists with 2 or 3
| levels. That is, the engineers were able to reason about the
| issues without employing the multi-level hierarchical
| outlines of the original PP pitches.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Bad presentations are eternal
| rdiddly wrote:
| Arguably that (and I think it might be Columbia you're thinking
| of) represents a misuse of lists though, because in my mind all
| the things on a list are supposed to be of roughly the same
| importance or size or magnitude. I would say that's part of the
| "contract," as this author puts it, that a list represents.
| (Although he doesn't mention that specifically.) On the
| PowerPoint slide in question, there are a bunch of good-news
| points and then the bad news is at the bottom in a smaller
| font. It's either incompetent or deliberately deceptive to set
| it up that way, and actually come to think of it, under those
| circumstances I kind of doubt the incompetent or deceptive
| author would've done a good job with paragraphs either.
|
| Anyway here's where this battle is really raging right now: on
| my resume. For years I've been distilling things down to
| action-oriented bullet points with dots, because I heard the
| Deputy likes dots.[0] Then I got an eyeful of someone else's
| resume that instead had articulate paragraphs intended to be
| read by, you know, a calm human being with some dignity and
| self-respect, and immediately felt like that was way better.
| But I dunno.....
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYuGNpOk5U
| yodon wrote:
| The typical screener in the hiring process spends 8 seconds
| or less making a decision to discard or advance a resume to
| the next stage.
|
| In the GP comment I advocated reading Tufte's critique of
| bulleted lists, but resumes are definitely a place where they
| significantly increase the odds the initial screeners can
| spot the things they want to see to advance your resume. A
| well structured list written using parallel construction
| (similar grammatical structure from one bullet to the next)
| is far far faster for a reader to parse. Once you've been
| told they want to interview you, you're generally free to
| submit an "updated" resume if you want to, which can be in
| prose format if you think that's best (but again not all
| interviewers will look at your resume more than a few seconds
| before they jump into the zoom session with you).
| sedatk wrote:
| What an insighftul analysis. I haven't noticed how vague my
| writing was until I started writing my book. Editors had to
| constantly correct me on missing information in my sentences
| which I didn't notice beforehand even once. They were always
| right. The whole writing experience has been truly eye-opening
| for me about how teaching is an entirely different skill set
| than writing.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| This is why it's valuable to proof read your work. After you
| write it, come back the next day and see if you still like it
| or it makes sense.
| codyb wrote:
| Precision and brevity are my guides for code comments after a
| careful ux analysis of comment encounters in code.
|
| Anything that makes me pause while reading code or a comment
| is something I'll strive in a timeboxed manner to simplify.
|
| It's not always possible, but my code doesn't get a lot of
| style comments or comments about readability anymore so seems
| to be working.
| DougMellon wrote:
| I'll also add to this. From my experience in the military,
| there were often times when the PowerPoint presentations fell
| victim to over-simplification as individuals omitted important
| details that were difficult to break down -- instead leaning on
| the talking points that were easier to list.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Found this account recently emphasizing how bonkers military
| PowerPoint slides can be
|
| https://twitter.com/DefenseCharts
| Infernal wrote:
| Thanks, I hate it
| drc500free wrote:
| My personal experience was as comms flows up a military org,
| the summarization process at every level is to mechanically
| convert each slide into a single bullet in the more senior
| deck. Everything became diluted, and there was no way for a
| key point to survive from the tactical level up to the flag
| level.
| FredPret wrote:
| But that is inherent in cognition.
|
| We see an incredibly detailed universe, and we simplify it
| into objects and personalities.
|
| Then we make it more abstract and talk about personalities
| doing things to objects, and so on up the chain, until we
| get to "army 1 did this to army 2".
| tomcat27 wrote:
| Literally every scientific paper has sections and subsections.
| Aka Lists.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Has. Not "is entirely".
| jacobolus wrote:
| The problem is not the existence of structure or lists. The
| problem is the presentation of complex material as
| hierarchical short bullet points.
|
| You can see some of Tufte's recommendations for formatting
| lists here https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
| msg?msg_id=...
| kovek wrote:
| I don't understand what's being explained. Should people
| use lists alongside paragraphs?
| yodon wrote:
| Tufte's article probably answers your question better
| than a once sentence answer her can.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| If you're a NASA manager and send people to their death because
| you can't be assed to properly read all the words on the
| screen, you should be tried for murder. There's no way the
| management was unaware, they just wanted to save money and hope
| for the best and not lose face, same as last disaster.
| joeman1000 wrote:
| Lists and outlines are great! Org-mode is built on this idea. It
| is an outliner at its core. It allows you to treat a whole
| document like a list. As a result I tend to add a skeleton to my
| documents before doing the bulk of the writing. If anyone is
| interested by what's in this article, please check out org-mode!
| SantalBlush wrote:
| The all-knowing Maddox wrote about the list format 10 years ago,
| in what is (imo) one of his best articles. [1]
|
| [1] http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=ranker_sucks
| wrs wrote:
| Maybe I'm dating myself, but I was taught to start writing by
| coming up with an _outline_ , which helps you organize your ideas
| into a coherent sequence. A list article basically makes its
| outline visible. The outline is also easily turned into an
| _introduction_ that can address the non-list structure problem at
| the end of this article.
| [deleted]
| hammock wrote:
| > Maybe I'm dating myself, but I was taught to start writing by
| coming up with an outline, which helps you organize your ideas
| into a coherent sequence. A list article basically makes its
| outline visible.
|
| In that sense, listicles (as they are known) are a
| suboptimal/locally optimal solution to the lack of trust
| readers have, which was engendered by too much bad writing out
| there. Readers have learned to mistrust long articles that
| aren't obvious at a glance about the value they will provide.
| codyb wrote:
| Outlines are fantastic! I generally do a map of ideas I'd like
| to touch on, then organize into a sequential list which flows
| well, then expand out into a document.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Agreed. I've written thousands of articles and won a couple of
| writing awards. Productivity and quality really clicked for me
| when I started doing my outlines as lists.
|
| I would do them in a text editor, one thought per line. The
| beauty of using a text editor is the shortcut keys that make it
| easy to move items up/down in the list. This is really nice as
| the outline develops and you build the plot and connecting
| tissue that ties the ideas together -- it's easy to play with
| different narratives in a text editor.
|
| I showed this method to a friend who is a NYT best selling
| author. He doesn't know a lick of code, but uses a text editor
| in his process now too.
|
| I actually do all of my writing in a text editor that doesn't
| have any spelling or grammar checking. This helps me stay
| focused on the ideas and think about editing later. My very
| last step of editing is moving the text into a word processor
| to catch spelling and grammatical errors that I may have
| missed.
|
| Anyway, I share this in case anyone else finds it useful. If
| someone has a process that works really well for them, I'd love
| to hear about it too!
| justinlloyd wrote:
| Not thousands published for me, but hundreds published
| definitely. There isn't a modern software development trade
| or software industry magazine I haven't gotten a published
| article in to, in some form. And my article always starts as
| an outline of the subject I wish to talk about. One brief
| thought per line. Typed up in OneNote with any kind of spell
| check switched off, or a basic text editor like yourself,
| with no formatting or styling or care for grammar or
| punctuation or spelling. No annoying squiggly red lines to
| distract me from my train of thought. Short cut keys to move
| things around.
| darkteflon wrote:
| That's really interesting. I've recently been thrown into a
| role that requires lots of structured writing.
|
| Could you elaborate on your process for outlining? What level
| of detail do you go into? Do you nest bullets or stick to one
| top-level list? Do you try to lay out the substance of your
| argument?
|
| I'd be interested in reading anything you'd recommend on the
| subject, too. Always appreciate hearing from people who do
| this on the daily.
| evanmoran wrote:
| This sounds really helpful! Can you share an example or two
| with both the outline and then the final writing? I'd love to
| see how the ideas become the final manuscript.
| humanistbot wrote:
| Agreed. There are a lot of people in tech (and in university CS
| programs) who like to sneer at the humanities, English majors,
| liberal arts, and the like. This is basic essay writing that
| everyone should know.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Could "inverted pyramid" also apply to supplying _technical_
| "connective tissue"?
|
| The traditional humanities teach appreciation of their own
| form of connective tissue, so to speak. Business writing
| arguably can be learned more quickly and emphasizes getting
| to the point.
| munchbunny wrote:
| What do you mean by traditional humanities? If you mean
| literature and skills like scripting out plots for
| characters and artful language in prose/poetry, then sure,
| it's not essential to business writing. However, if you're
| talking about essay writing, persuasive writing, clear
| language, laying out complex arguments, etc. then it's
| very, very relevant to business writing. Both categories
| are part of traditional humanities.
|
| Getting to the point on nuanced issues like strategy or
| design is actually quite difficult because you have to both
| understand your point well enough to distill it and you
| have to be good at putting the words down. I'd argue that
| the "understanding" part is harder because, from my
| personal experience, someone who is thinking clearly and
| just not fluent in English still organizes the writing
| clearly, but someone who isn't thinking clearly will
| produce great syntax but the reasoning is hard to follow.
|
| I see much more of the latter than the former in my day to
| day.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Same with me; I recall being taught to start things off with an
| outline, as you described. For work - where I get less chances
| to craft essays/long-form writing, it seems that lists prevail.
| It is more about "getting things done"/conveying actions/todos
| as fast/efficient as possible vs longer-form writing where
| there is opportunity to enjoy the "trip", or at least gradually
| dive into a particular topic. For me, essays - at least
| nowadays - are like slowly wading into the ocean deeper and
| deeper for enjoyment...While crafting lists is like taking a
| shower; a fast, practical way to get clean. ;-)
| tjr wrote:
| I enjoy Dave Winer's outlining tools. I'm not fond of the
| often-used Twitter authentication (just personal preference;
| no technical reason), but the overall concept and work flow
| of the tools themselves is really nice.
| runjake wrote:
| Link for others curious:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=dave+winer+outlining
|
| If anyone has a better, more specific link, please reply,
| I'm curious.
| gowld wrote:
| Are there current tools? http://outliners.scripting.com is
| stuff from the 1980s, last updated in 1999
|
| Today's premium Mac offering is OmniOutliner ($20 barebones
| or $100 full-featured)
| https://www.omnigroup.com/omnioutliner/
| antiframe wrote:
| Emacs has a wonderful outline mode and even more
| featurful org-mode. Easy to navigate, restructure,
| filter, etc.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| I receive his daily blog post via email, so I have read a
| lot of his comments about "outliners" and how wonderful
| they are. It always leaves me scratching my head; I mean,
| doesn't MS Word (and MS Excel, for that matter) have
| outlining capabilities built-in? How many different ways
| are there to construct an outline?
| gowld wrote:
| https://www.omnigroup.com/omnioutliner/features/
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Is it just me or does the list look more maintainable than the
| hypothetical essay? lol
| solarkraft wrote:
| I structure most of my writing and (especially) notes as deeply
| nested, tree-formed lists. It works fabulously for keeping an
| overview.
| FpUser wrote:
| Goal for the next century: discover paragraphs, levels and table
| of content.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I don't like lists.
|
| Written lists.
|
| Lists written out to try and impart knowledge and information to
| the reader.
|
| I do like being able to dip in to things, in an exploratory,
| unconnected fashion, but lists, especially in modern SEO writing
| for the web, have turned in to some bastardized version of useful
| information.
|
| My usual train of thought is "a list that isn't a list", e.g.
| https://justinlloyd.li/blog/3d-printer-purchase/ for a 3D printer
| purchase or my three year long train of thought on prime number
| research at https://justinlloyd.li/blog/prime-numbers/.
|
| On a side note, when I am writing a lengthy article, I usually
| assemble a list of bullet points first, the outline, and then
| convert the bullet points into prose, and then re-order the
| prose, then edit the prose so that it flows.
|
| But I think lists are a terrible, terrible travesty of the modern
| web, because they are so abused.
|
| And bullet pointed lists in a presentation, I consider those
| kinds of things to be used by people who don't understand the
| subject, to teach people even less knowledgable about the
| subject, everything that they know. Which ain't much.
| iandanforth wrote:
| I find that slack has moved my writing towards lists more and
| more. Specifically anything up for a group discussion that _can_
| be broken down into a series of points I do, and I use a
| different "line" to do so. This way each statement can spawn a
| thread for further discussion. I don't always use numbered lists
| or even bulleted lists, but I write for a _series of items_
| rather than a block of interwoven information.
|
| This is similar to some academic writing I've done where the
| author of a section writes each sentence on a separate line so
| that it can be commented on more easily before all the sentences
| are rejoined into paragraph form.
| verve_rat wrote:
| This seems like an argument for using headings. The "list" part
| seems irrelevant.
| timwis wrote:
| Exactly. See page structure on
| https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...
| exolymph wrote:
| Myself, I tend toward flowery prose with copious clauses and
| parentheticals. But listing -- or building out a list into an
| essay -- is an incredibly effective communication tactic. I would
| rather have people write lists than write nothing, and for most
| writers, I would also rather read their boiled-down lists than
| their hilariously padded nonfiction books.
| [deleted]
| waprin wrote:
| The love of lists seems to explain the explosion of Twitter
| threads. Some of them are long form messages spliced up but most
| of them are some form of lists.
|
| I'm personally still partial to a good old blog posts with
| paragraphs, both for writing and reading, but like the author I
| can't help but notice that readers love lists.
| exolymph wrote:
| What drives Twitter threads is that there are a bunch of
| readers on Twitter, and it's easier to reach them there, where
| they already hang out, than to get them to visit a blog or
| whatever offsite. This is exacerbated by Twitter itself
| downranking links and upranking threads, because Twitter
| doesn't _want_ people to be directed offsite. Unless you have
| strong incentives to care about getting your readers offsite
| (e.g. to get them on an email list so you can reach them more
| reliably in the future so you can sell them something), it 's
| more efficient to just blog directly on Twitter.
| hintymad wrote:
| > It's because there ain't no way to re-write mathematical
| analysis as a "list". When you do write a list, you are promising
| that you've figured out a way to cover the subject in that way
| without losing essential detail.
|
| I'm not sure this works out for a math textbook, or any book at
| all. We build our understanding and knowledge by layering up
| abstractions, and the abstractions form a graph. A linear list to
| cover all the preqreq will be tedious and repetitive, to say the
| least.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I always felt math material would lend itself well to a
| directed acyclic graph of topics/information. It's something I
| tend to do informally - look at an equation I need to
| understand, then go backwards to the pre-requisites until
| things are explained in terms of things I'm already familiar
| with.
| layer8 wrote:
| I wish Wikipedia was acyclic for math topics.
| Torwald wrote:
| I think this warrants a re-link:
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html
| jzer0cool wrote:
| This is because we are living in a system built upon filtering
| out noise. Also, to filter out from sensory overflow.
| kpierce wrote:
| I feel like this article was written just for the last paragraph
| payoff.
| underwater wrote:
| Lists are great, but shouldn't be used for everything.
|
| This article is a perfect example. These items are all supporting
| a thesis that the visual nature of lists provides clear value to
| the reader. The author asserts lists "allow readers to quickly
| and easily get what they want". But the text doesn't take the
| time to properly establish why that is the most important
| property of writing.
|
| Because the author hasn't properly sold the core idea, the
| subsequent list items just come across as a shotgun approach. It
| seems as though the author thinks that it they throw out enough
| ideas one of them will stick, or that the reader will assume that
| the sheer volume of points means the idea is solid.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I don't think I have a problem with lists, just with the kinds of
| websites that use lists.
|
| Back in the day it was common for each item on the list to be its
| own page. These days, I'm guaranteed to have a popup to subscribe
| to a mailing list.
| zwieback wrote:
| Agree up to a point. When I see "37 x about y" I keep scrolling.
| It has to be a reasonable number of items.
|
| I love lists for emails - whenever I write an email that mentions
| more than one point I put everything in numbered paragraphs.
| Sometimes I also do 1) 2) 3) for information and a) b) c) for
| questions that refer back to the numbered list. Makes it a lot
| easier for followups to stay on track.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| I believe the major advantage of lists is that they make it easy
| to block out all the chaff from the rest of the prose, allowing
| you to comfortably concentrate on the current item. That's the
| same advantage provided by _well-chosen_ taxonomies. Also I think
| the best UIs are defined by how well they help you identify the
| areas which you can ignore. I wish this were an explicit priority
| for designers.
| tempestn wrote:
| Was going to comment on the irony of this not being a list, then
| got to the excellent final line.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I don't think this article makes a good argument for this style
| because it reads like someone's powerpoint slides. It doesn't
| flow well visually and there isn't enough text for any kind of
| nuance.
|
| For a better example of this type of writing, I recommend looking
| at how Rails Guides are written:
| https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_validations.htm...
| smackeyacky wrote:
| In Microsoft Word, you can use "View->Outline".
|
| This displays something cut-down into the structure of the
| document, so the headings can be shrunk with their included text.
| I found it in the past to be a really useful way to build a
| document before it's formatted. i.e. put in all the headings you
| think you will need first, then gradually fill out the text under
| each heading. Once the document starts to flesh out, you will
| find bits that naturally fit together, so you can restructure and
| have something cohesive.
|
| After that, format away in the normal mode.
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(page generated 2022-03-18 23:00 UTC)