

Writing with Less Writing - arikrak
http://www.zappable.com/2012/11/writing-with-less-writing/

======
klibertp
The format of presentation is highly dependent on the content and intended
audience. There are many pieces of writing that I would consider broken with
addition of outlines and tables; in other cases adding more visual clues for
the reader is of course a good thing to do.

There is a reason, however, why those alternative to paragraphs forms of
presentation are not used widely and that's just because using them properly
is hard, and misusing them makes text even less readable.

Many people have problems counting parenthesis in their writing, or - more
generally - they can't insert an aside into a paragraph (like 'more generally'
before or the content in parens here - I'm not sure about the term in
English). Heck, many people are incapable of correctly using punctuation and
the mess of commas, periods and words they create is completely unreadable. I
can only guess, but I think a percentage of people that would create
meaningless tables and misleading outlines would be even greater.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't encourage more visually appealing ways of
writing, but I get the feeling that this should not be a primary concern when
so many people are functionally illiterate... On the other hand, maybe - if
they are going to loose the ability to read anyway - using tables would be a
good, gentle transition back to using ideograms exclusively?

------
ivan_ah
I am a big fan of concept maps, which are graphical representations for
concepts and the relationships between them. Sometimes the edges can contain
verbs and the concept map starts to contain entire sentences.

For example check out the concept map from my upcoming book titled "No
Bullshit Guide to Math and Physics": everything you need to know about
Calculus and Mechanics in just 200 pages.

<http://mcgillweb.alwaysdata.net/concept_map.png> (generated using CmapTools)

~~~
arikrak
I've looked at Mind Maps before, which I assume are similar. They look
interesting, though one would need to make sure they don't overwhelm the
reader. I think collapsible content could help with that though (and with
linear outlines too).

------
arikrak
I think there could be more outlines and diagrams in place of text. Paragraphs
of text are often necessary, but the question is to what extent could
alternatives be tried.

~~~
klibertp
Well, I think there is no hard limit for this. I think that diagrams, tables
and such are just tools for the author to better convey his message. If the
author is skilled enough to put _all the content_ into some form other than
paragraphs then it's all good. I would, personally, rather have read the whole
sentences and paragraphs, but that's just me and I can appreciate well written
(created?) infographic, too.

As I hinted above the problem is that the more novel the form is, the more
skill it requires from author to be understood when using this form.
Paragraphs are boring, old school and thus easy to produce in such a way that
the readers will know what to do with them. On the other hand creating a
diagram or concept/mind map that will be immediately readable is much harder.

------
mvzink
If only there were some more obvious connection between the bullet points in
this outline, I would be compelled to finish reading it...

