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How I learned to stop worrying and structure all writing as a list
- Torwald 5y agoI think this warrants a re-link: http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html
- SantalBlush 5y agoThe 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 http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=ranker_sucks
- solarkraft 5y agoI structure most of my writing and (especially) notes as deeply nested, tree-formed lists. It works fabulously for keeping an overview.
- verve_rat 5y agoThis seems like an argument for using headings. The "list" part seems irrelevant.
- timwis 5y agoExactly. See page structure on https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-uk https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...
- grey_earthling 5y agoYes, the form this article discusses is not what I would call a list. To me, a list consists of bullet points, each of which is no more than 1 sentence. It's not prose as such. I'd also assume that the list might be hierarchically nested. The article seems to be discussing listicles (or list articles): effectively a series of very short essays that parallel each other, making the same point from a different angle each time, or comparing and contrasting a series of subjects. It's a suitable form if that's the over-all point you're trying to make. Mainly the article extolls the virtues of organising prose into relatively-short sections, each with a clear heading. I agree this makes prose more readable, but I don't think that's an uncommon opinion.
- rahimiali 5y agoThe article explains why lists aren’t just headings on top of paragraphs. For example, the list can be read in any order. There is no dependence between them.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- acenes 4y agoDo we no longer have the attention span to just read text? Do we need 'multiple entry points'? Do we have to convince the reader that each chunk of text will provide 'value' separate from others? How sad.
- FpUser 5y agoGoal for the next century: discover paragraphs, levels and table of content.
- wrs 5y agoMaybe 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.
- mxuribe 5y agoSame 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 5y agoI 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 5y agoLink for others curious: https://www.google.com/search?q=dave+winer+outlining https://www.google.com/search?q=dave+winer+outlining If anyone has a better, more specific link, please reply, I'm curious.
- tjr 5y agohttp://docserver.scripting.com/drummer/about.opml http://docserver.scripting.com/drummer/about.opml
- PopAlongKid 5y ago
- zwieback 5y agoAgree 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.
- smiley1437 5y agoIs it just me or does the list look more maintainable than the hypothetical essay? lol
- kayodelycaon 5y agoI 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.html https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_validations.htm...
- andreshb 5y agoLists 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 5y agoIf 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 5y agoNext 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 5y agoI 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 5y agoI 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.
- yodon 5y agoIf 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/tufte-powerpoint.pdf https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/...
- DougMellon 5y agoI'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.
- drc500free 5y agoMy 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 5y agoBut 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”.
- unixhero 5y agoAnd add a satellite to any on the ground architecture.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- joeman1000 5y agoLists 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!
- waprin 5y agoThe 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 5y agoWhat 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.
- jzer0cool 5y agoThis is because we are living in a system built upon filtering out noise. Also, to filter out from sensory overflow.
- kpierce 5y agoI feel like this article was written just for the last paragraph payoff.
- exolymph 5y agoMyself, 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.
- hintymad 5y ago> 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 5y agoI 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 5y agoI wish Wikipedia was acyclic for math topics.
- LAC-Tech 5y agoI 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.
- morninglight 5y agoPerhaps 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 https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf
- feoren 5y agoLOL government bad. Taxes, amiright? Guys? Guys?
- iandanforth 5y agoI 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.
- smackeyacky 5y agoIn 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.
- tempestn 5y agoWas going to comment on the irony of this not being a list, then got to the excellent final line.
- justinlloyd 5y agoI 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/ 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/ 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.
- underwater 5y agoLists 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.
- MarkLowenstein 5y agoI 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.
- anamax 5y agoI always use numbered lists when sending questions to customer support because otherwise they respond with some irrelevant quote from the documentation.
- jancsika 5y ago> It’s crazy how much more attractive the list is, even when there’s zero content. Why? * it's funny-- the list example appeals to me for content like HN posts. * for something like a prose analysis of the first 33 measures of the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 101, the non-list version is more appealing. In fact, my prejudice is that the list version will be both a gloss and factually inaccurate. * if I were a prankster I'd name this phenomenon after a physicist friend and subtly spread it as a low-effort shorthand for critiquing the quality of HN posts. Edit: almost forgot-- my post should be formatted as a list
- bryanrasmussen 5y agohmm, which of these two am I drawn to: >“Theory and practice of effective sleep” >“Seven insights about sleep” hmm, the first one sounds like an in-depth exhaustive text on the subject that if I have the time to read it I will definitely learn something from. The second sounds like SEO listicle crap at least 5 of which insights will be really obvious things that only an idiot would need explained to them, 1 of which will sound deep and insightful but if I read the first text will turn out to have been misinterpreted and actually mean almost the obvious of what is supposed, and 1 of which might be slightly helpful. I think I might want to read the first, but only if I really want to learn something about sleep, and I might read the second one for some reason at some point and immediately think why do I waste my time with this stuff.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agopast the edit window, so "almost the obvious" is supposed to be almost the opposite, guessable from context. In my defence, was writing with very low light late at night and tired.
- chociej 5y ago> Are you drawn to the second? I am. I mean this with all sincerity, but dear god, no, I certainly am not. My conditioning tells me that the second option (the listicle) is probably going to be worthless and filled with terrible advertising.
- mwattsun 5y agoA starting point for exploring Wikipedia is "List of lists of lists" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
- rahimiali 5y agoThe top comments aren’t doing the article justice. The article is really about the kinds of subjects that can be covered in depth as small sections that do not have dependencies between them. It explains the value of topics that can be presented this way, then explains these articles need to publicize this fact by claiming to be lists. Seriously well argued position and I recommend reading the whole thing. Notability the article is not about hierarchical bulleted lists.
- voidfunc 5y agoI was a Philosophy major, one of my fave philosophers is Aristotle primarily because most of his arguments are just a list propositions and then a conclusion. Its dressed up a little but compared to folks after him it’s relatively straightforward.
- syngrog66 5y agoOA is a case of "everything old becomes new again, to younger generations" things we knew decades ago: bullet points nice; section & section headers nice; summaries nice
- atweiden 5y agoCheck out vim-journal [1] if you really want to take this to the next level. The plugin’s kaleidoscopic colour functionality visually incentivizes writing in list format constantly. The colours are enjoyable to look at, and you get more of them on your screen each time you indent a list item. which - makes you organize your thoughts differently - because - the more colour, the better - e.g. - you’ll want to write like this [1]: https://github.com/junegunn/vim-journal https://github.com/junegunn/vim-journal
- totetsu 5y agoThings I learned how to do: - Stop worrying - Structure ALL writing as list.
- jasfi 5y agoLists help writers get to the point.
- Ldorigo 5y agoRelated to his point on how mathematics can't fit into a list, but rather needs a graph representation - does anyone know if there are efforts to map out a large network of mathematics as a graph of dependencies? (Ideally as an acyclic directed graph so there's no instances of subjects being their own prerequisites but maybe that's illusory)
- mbeex 5y agoAn example of digital dementia in my opinion. Just test which list entries you still remember after two hours (or in many cases, after 10 minutes)
- leokennis 5y agoI at least make sure all my work mails are numbered lists: 1. Easy for replies to refer to a certain portion of my mail (just mention the number) 2. Lists result in shorter emails with less fluff - always an advantage for work related communication 3. Especially for people with less writing skills, lists make it clearer what the priorities are. “Item 4” is of more importance than “Item 2b”. If you’re only using words, you need mastery of language to convey that.
- krsdcbl 5y agoI think one very crucial point is missing from the article that explains a lot of the appeal of lists: lists give me an idea, or at least the illusion of knowing content length beforehand or very early on. When i see the first list item and the title says "seven of those", i can gauge my time investment in consuming that content. It's important that this is abstract, as "500 words" has little intuitive meaning but "4 pieces of roughly this text block" is a very natural way of evaluating my time commitment, subconsciously.
- submeta 5y agoI was an avid user of outliner apps myself (Netmanage's ECCO Pro some twenty years ago, later OmniOutliner on my Mac, and recently Emacs/Org or Roam Research), until I realized that trying to distill my ideas down to the core structure, the narrative of what I am trying to tell get's lost. This is something that Jeff Bezos laments about PowerPoint [1]: /quote/ Anytime an Amazon worker has an idea to discuss, they’re asked to structure their pitch in the form of a 4-6 page memo, which the company calls a “narrative.” Well structured, narrative text is what we’re after rather than just text. If someone builds a list of bullet points in word, that would be just as bad as powerpoint. The reason writing a 4 page memo is harder than “writing” a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related. Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the innerconnectedness of ideas. /unquote/ I value outliners a lot, but when I started writing down my ideas in full sentences, I was forced to create arguments more clearly and explicitly, and that helps me get clearer about my problem domain. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/jeff-bezos-email-against-powerpoint-presentations-2015-7 https://www.businessinsider.com.au/jeff-bezos-email-against-...
- swah 5y ago- Lists are appealing - Lists promise value quickly - Lists promise different types of value - Lists promise limited complexity - Lists promise many entrance points - A list is a contract between the writer and reader - A list promises “list-tractability” - How to stop worrying Also: - I only had to read those headings and check the images to read this article in under a minute. - I'll never know if something was lost. - Youtube also has lists nowadays. - I'm a skimmer and I feel bad. - I opened a book yesterday and it was very relaxing.
- DFHippie 5y agoI'm going to pull out the last paragraph, because I feel the comments up to this point haven't given it enough love: > So, say you’ve written something that feels ranty and disorganized. It’s often useful to retrospectively turn it into a list. If this takes a lot of reorganization, that’s good—it means you’re untangling your ideas. And you don’t need to write a “pure” list—use other sections if you need them. If you still feel lame after all this, just give the piece a non-list title and leave the list items unnumbered. No one will even notice what you’ve done.
- qualudeheart 5y agoThe universe is implemented as a many dimensional linked list on a cheap Chromebook in base reality.
- xg15 4y ago- I was sort of wondering if this article would be written as a list. - I was not disappointed. - The insight is nevertheless good.
- gw67 4y agoI recommend "The pyramid principle" book.