How I learned to stop worrying and structure all writing as a list

by Naac • 4 years ago

479 131 4 years ago

wrs• 4 years ago

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.

mxuribe• 4 years ago

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. ;-)

tjr3• 4 years ago

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.

hammock• 4 years ago

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.

humanistbot• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

bonestamp22• 4 years ago

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!

darkteflon• 4 years ago

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.

justinlloyd2• 4 years ago

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.

evanmoran• 4 years ago

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.

codyb3• 4 years ago

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.

spccdt2• 4 years ago

What tool(s) do you use to do that?

LichenStone• 4 years ago

I tend to write in a very non-linear fashion, I'll often write individual sentences and paragraphs in a different order to the final product, as I think of them. Then I fill in the gaps, move things around until the writing forms a linear grammatical representation of the pure thought structure of the idea that existed in my brain.

novosel• 4 years ago

I agree with you. That is also my personal mode of operation. I see the value in the outline approach, but it is, in my opinion, limited to a certain kind of writing. Where the work of thinking about the subject is already there. But there is also times when writing IS the thinking. There is a work being done when writing, not simply reporting.

And, I also think this is not an either_or situation, text can be locally structured by outline method, and then at other places marked by nonlinear growth, or progressing by lists. And these domains can overlap, and be of different sizes. Nor do I think there are only these three methods. Text can accommodate vastly different approaches.

zwieback• 4 years ago

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.

smiley1437• 4 years ago

Is it just me or does the list look more maintainable than the hypothetical essay? lol

kayodelycaon2• 4 years ago

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...

andreshb• 4 years ago

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

kayodelycaon2• 4 years ago

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.

gowld4• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

yodon4• 4 years ago

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/...

DougMellon• 4 years ago

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.

drc500free• 4 years ago

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.

Apocryphon• 4 years ago

Found this account recently emphasizing how bonkers military PowerPoint slides can be

https://twitter.com/DefenseCharts

tomcat27• 4 years ago

Literally every scientific paper has sections and subsections. Aka Lists.

jacobolus• 4 years ago

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=...

Dylan16807• 4 years ago

Has. Not "is entirely".

pengaru• 4 years ago

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).

gowld4• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

Bad presentations are eternal

loloquwowndueo• 4 years ago

Harvard Graphics Forever

sedatk• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

codyb3• 4 years ago

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.

hackerfromthefu• 4 years ago

The difference may be that you are not getting feedback on the quality of your teaching.

jimmaswell• 4 years ago

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.

rdiddly2• 4 years ago

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

yodon4• 4 years ago

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).

crdrost• 4 years ago

So if I'm reading your resume, I am personally trying to get a quick scan of you as a person before I meet you. Do you have an education? Or are you self-taught? Neither one is bad. Do you have an education in a completely different field, and is it interesting to me, could we bond over it? How long have you been in the industry for, was it at one place or a bunch of places, was that place dedicated to tech or was it a small tech team adjoined to a larger company doing other stuff. If I am diving into those it is because I want to know more about the level of responsibility you took on at that job. I wouldn't put it into bullet points because it shouldn't be long enough that you need bullet points, I need to know were you leading the team, mentoring others (more dev experience vs more leadership qualities--neither is bad), or were you a solid engineer, or were you transitioning from say security work to development. Just give me one or two sentences about who you were at that job.

Basically, reading is much faster than listening, so I would like to not waste your time in the interview getting to know things that you already told me through a faster, asynchronous medium.

BUT. But. A bunch of places that I have worked at also have a process by which a non-technical person pre-processes your resume before handing it to me. They are looking to see whether you have checked the boxes. IDK what boxes, it depends on what those folks are taking out of the posting. It probably helps if you have a section of buzzwords so that they can say “they say they have React experience, I can check the React box!” For me most of those criteria are fungible, but you have to put something for the HR folks to screen out half the applications.

Now, the interview is where it gets a bit trickier. I used to have a great approach to this, when I worked at smaller companies and had more say in the hiring process. That was just, “your resume is a claim that you are a certain sort of person, my interview just tests whether you are who you say you are, are you faking it or are you selling yourself short?” In other words if you say you managed your coworkers I want to devote 15 minutes to see what sort of manager you are, even for a non-management role.

But, now I work at a Big Tech company and I don't really have that freedom... Now when I am interviewing you, I have usually been asked to either assess culture fit or technical chops... If technical chops, I am usually not tailoring my questions too closely to your resume, but to the forms that I have to fill out after the interview. The actual programming exercise will usually be amorphous, the actual work will be simple but the scope will be unbounded relative to the interview length—and so I am not expecting you to complete it so much as to parcel it up into smaller workable chunks and execute on one or two of those. Based on how you do this I can usually give decent feedback on my forms without feeling like I have fed you a trick question.

kqr2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

skybrian• 4 years ago

A bulleted list, particularly in a slide presentation, is all headings, no content.

Sometimes the presenter talks about each item, giving meaningful detail while the structure is there on the screen. But it means that someone reading the slides alone misses the detail. Someone not listening carefully misses it too.

In written work, the headings are just headings. The paragraphs under the headings are the content. You can write transitions, too.

rattray• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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".

unobatbayar• 4 years ago

What does worrying have to do with writing structures?

To further improve the title: "The advantages of list structure on most writings".

themadturk• 4 years ago

I think the connective tissue in such a list-article (I hesitate to use “listicle” because it sounds so trivial) is in the introduction and conclusion. The intro is the classic “tell them what you’re going to tell them,” the list itself is the “tell them,” and the conclusion is the “tell them what you told them.” And items within the list can refer to other items, still letting the reader start anywhere while potentially guiding the reader to earlier points and tying the overall piece together.

_pmf_• 4 years ago

In the Challenger case, the bad information has been deliberately hidden within the structure. They could just as well have pulled it up in the structure.

It's like saying variable font sizes are inherently bad because due to them, contracts can have small print sections.

afarrell2• 4 years ago

However, if you are a person struggling to get into a habit of writing, it is okay if you do not yet have aerospace-grade writing. You can stop worrying and structure all your writing as lists.

You don't need to weigh yourself down with the responsibility to prevent a catastrophic misunderstanding among rocket scientists.

JasonFruit• 4 years ago

That it caused a catastrophe and the participants were rocket scientists doesn't mean the problem was anything more than poor communication. The information on the slide in question wasn't hard to understand; it was arranged in a way that distorted its meaning.

Torwald• 4 years ago

I think this warrants a re-link:

http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html

joeman1000• 4 years ago

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!

waprin• 4 years ago

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.

exolymph2• 4 years ago

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.

jzer0cool• 4 years ago

This is because we are living in a system built upon filtering out noise. Also, to filter out from sensory overflow.

kpierce• 4 years ago

I feel like this article was written just for the last paragraph payoff.

FpUser• 4 years ago

Goal for the next century: discover paragraphs, levels and table of content.

exolymph2• 4 years ago

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.

hintymad• 4 years 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-Tech2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

I wish Wikipedia was acyclic for math topics.

LAC-Tech2• 4 years ago

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.

morninglight• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

LOL government bad. Taxes, amiright? Guys? Guys?

iandanforth• 4 years ago

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.

smackeyacky• 4 years ago

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.

SantalBlush• 4 years ago

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

solarkraft• 4 years ago

I structure most of my writing and (especially) notes as deeply nested, tree-formed lists. It works fabulously for keeping an overview.

tempestn• 4 years ago

Was going to comment on the irony of this not being a list, then got to the excellent final line.

verve_rat• 4 years ago

This seems like an argument for using headings. The "list" part seems irrelevant.

timwis• 4 years ago

Exactly. See page structure on https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...

grey_earthling• 4 years ago

Yes, 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.

rahimiali2• 4 years ago

The 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.

justinlloyd2• 4 years ago

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.

underwater• 4 years ago

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.

MarkLowenstein• 4 years ago

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.

anamax• 4 years ago

I always use numbered lists when sending questions to customer support because otherwise they respond with some irrelevant quote from the documentation.

jancsika• 4 years 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

bryanrasmussen2• 4 years ago

hmm, 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.

bryanrasmussen2• 4 years ago

past 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

A starting point for exploring Wikipedia is "List of lists of lists"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists

rahimiali2• 4 years ago

The 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• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

OA 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• 4 years ago

Check 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

totetsu• 4 years ago

Things I learned how to do:

- Stop worrying

- Structure ALL writing as list.

jasfi• 4 years ago

Lists help writers get to the point.

Ldorigo• 4 years ago

Related 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• 4 years ago

An 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• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

I 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-...

swah• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I'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• 4 years ago

The universe is implemented as a many dimensional linked list on a cheap Chromebook in base reality.

xg15• 4 years ago

- I was sort of wondering if this article would be written as a list.

- I was not disappointed.

- The insight is nevertheless good.

acenes• 4 years ago

Do 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.

gw67• 4 years ago

I recommend "The pyramid principle" book.

How I learned to stop worrying and structure all writing as a list

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