FormOfText

History

(Note: A lot of this is written from "I heard a guy say that" memory - if anybody has a lot of time to spend doing research, or knows a lot about the topic, correct as needed. this *is* a wiki)

If an ancient greek wanted to write something, it would look like:

• TWASBRILLIGANDTHESLITHYTO
  WEHTNIELBMIGDNAERYGDIDSEV
  ABEALLMIMSYWERETHEBOROGOV
  EBARGTUOSHTAREMOMEHTDNASE
  

No spaces, everything in capital letters, abd the text snakes back and forth across the page so the reader's eye doesn't have to go look for the beginning of the line. If all you're gonna do is carve "Achilles, son of Bob. Kicked Trojan but" underneath a statue, you don't need too many typographic bells and whistles. Heck, the Chinese still do things that way (except for the snaking back and forth, but the fixed left-to-right convention is an european influence), and it reads fine because individual characters have high InformationDensity and words are generally one or two characters long (As a consequence, one of the biggest challenges in Chinese Natural Language Processing is word segmentation - finding out where words start and stop. Imagine the fun the ancient greeks would have had ^-).

Now, as writing became more widespread, people came up with clever hacks. For example, those big capital letters are great for carving on stone, but couldn't we devise something simpler, more compact, that doesn't make the hand move as much when you write with a feather ? Hence the invention of lower-case letters and all kinds of typography and punctuation that make the job easier for the reader and the writer.

However, people would keep on writing bloody long bits of text without stopping. It wan't until printing was invented that the use of paragraphs became widespread.

And the computer may be having a similar effect on our written language. I've heard that bullet points are used much more often in writing now than fifty years ago; people will use them more naturally than they used to. And who among you has ever used smilies in a written letter ? (Or said "lol" aloud ?)

the Form of Text

(a proto-page- I don't have time to completely write this.)

This page investigates these forms of text:

• the Hierarchical Bullet-List

• the Poem

• Rows in TabularForm

• the Paragraph

( ... the ("flat") simple list ... the numbered list ... the lettered/numbered hierarchical list ... footnotes ... sidenotes ... What other arrangements of words on paper do you know about ? )

The Hierarchical Bullet-List

Example:

• We're going to do this.

• This.

• And that!

  • (Taking care not to...)

• Finally, this.

The hierarchical bullet-list is good for:

• Identifying discrete elements.

• Presenting structure.

The Poem

Example:

• THE SOUL unto itself
  Is an imperial friend,—
  Or the most agonizing spy
  An enemy could send.
  

  Secure against its own,
  No treason it can fear;
  Itself its sovereign, of itself
  The soul should stand in awe.
  

Somehow, Emily Dickenson's just not the same when you use bullet points:

• THE SOUL unto itself

• Is an imperial friend,

• Or the most agonizing spy

• An enemy could send.

• Secure against its own,

• No treason it can fear;

• Itself its sovereign, of itself

• The soul should stand in awe.

Because: Bullet points communicate to us discrete ideas, and focuses our attention on the organization, by the vehicle of the big black dot column.

Rows in Tabular Form

(see also: TabularForm)

Rows in tabular form communicate uniformity.

With several columns and several rows, it also communicates completeness -- when every combination of row and column has something written there -- or incompleteness -- when blank, empty spaces appear.

Example:

• (put good example here. can't think up anything just now.)

However, Emily Dickenson doesn't like it:

No. Definitely not.

the Paragraph

Finally, the traditional paragraph.

The traditional paragraph emphasises two major elements:

• The topic sentence.

• The block of topic + expansion on the topic.

The paragraph emphasises a continuous stream of sound over structure. That is, it discards structural information in exchange for a fluid stream of sound.

If you have a 10-line paragraph, it may include 3 major points, and 1 minor point. But to figure out what they are, you'll have to fish through the entire paragraph. Even then, you may not be consciously aware of the structure. You'll learn the ideas, but you may not have the structure in your mind.

It's...

• A

• B

  • b-minor-point

• C

...vs...

• Blahblah-blah-A,-and-blahblah-B,and-blahblah-C. Now, blahblah blah, blah blah blah blah. And then blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah. So, A is blah blah blah. And you have blah blah blah, which connects to B, which is blah bleh. So the bleh blah blah blah, which means blah bleh blah. But that goes back to A. And so, because it goes to A, there's also b, which is a blickity blah blah. But then there's also C, because C is like a bleh bleh bleck. And then it recombines, into this whole other things. So blah bleh.

The one major structural element of the paragraph is the first sentence. However, the rest of the structure is in the paragraph. The paragraph form is used to emphasise flow of sound, and continuity of reading. You do not need to "stop and think," to interpret the paragraph.

Contributors

This page is only half-expressive. However, it should give the basic idea of what I'm communicating. -- LionKimbro

LionKimbro

Discussion

ChrisPurcell pointed out (on BulletSummaryBlock) that you can make it easy to scan point-to-point in a paragraph in two ways:

• Put a point at the beginning of a paragraph.

• Make the key words bold.

For example:

• Blahblah-blah-A,-and-blahblah-B,and-blahblah-C. Now, blahblah blah, blah blah blah blah. And then blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah. So, A is blah blah blah. And you have blah blah blah, which connects to B, which is blah bleh. So the bleh blah blah blah, which means blah bleh blah. But that goes back to A. And so, because it goes to A, there's also b, which is a blickity blah blah. But then there's also C, because C is like a bleh bleh bleck. And then it recombines, into this whole other things. So blah bleh.

This isn't a straight "paragraph" in traditional form: It's not many books that use bold. Maybe we should call it a "hypertext paragraph," or a "hyper paragraph," or something like that. (What do you call a paragraph that makes use of a lot of visual technique? I don't know.)

It's more scannable than a regular paragraph. It's still not as scannable as a bullet-point list.

-- LionKimbro

What about AsciiArt ?