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I'm making a new tool for writers. With it, you'll be able to write your essays on "layers" The problem? Tweets are easier to read than long-form essays, as th
by chdaniel 7y ago
I'm making a new tool for writers. With it, you'll be able to write your essays on "layers"
The problem? Tweets are easier to read than long-form essays, as they require less time commitment. If the content is not good on a long-form article, you'll find out way too late. With this tool I'm developing:
Layer 1 is the shortest version of your essay, the 1 min read — like a tweet. The idea boiled down to the shortest version
Layer 2 is the same text from layer 1, but with extras added here and there. What's already read by you is in black ink. What's new is in blue ink. This is the 2 min read version
Layer 3 shows everything from Layer 1 and 2 in black ink, but what's new is now in blue ink. and you keep doing that until you get to the full version.
I can post some screenshots here of my mockups, as I'm a designer. PM me if you find this intriguing!
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Edit: Since people are showing interest, here's how I see it happening — https://invis.io/GQWINO2YKU2#/410298082_1_Min_Verison https://invis.io/GQWINO2YKU2#/410298082_1_Min_Verison
The first thing that you see is the first layer (1 min version). Go right for 3 and 5 min version!
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Edit 2: since I'm seeing the upvotes and the emails, I quickly made this sign-up form for the people who want to be updated when the product is done: https://layered-ink.webflow.io/ https://layered-ink.webflow.io/
I would put up the https://layered.ink https://layered.ink link but the domain hasn't been propagated yet.
@Admins — please do let me know if this is not permitted so I can take it down. Apologies if so.
- keenmaster 7y agoCan anyone vertically scan 5 paragraphs of a long-form article in a 1-2 seconds and ambiently detect keywords that signal relevance? By ambient, I mean in your peripheral vision, without even knowing which word you're looking for or actively reading anything. I acquired this "skill" about a year ago and now I use it when I suspect there may be filler text or introductions to concepts I already understand. I know it works because I uncannily land on interesting but otherwise nondescript passages. When I scroll back up I find that I did indeed skip the filler. Of course, this isn't voodoo or unprecedented. It's just funny that I've read so much that my brain basically has a regression model for various semantic characteristics that signal novelty by subject area. I suspect I also switch into different modes of scanning based on the writing style detected. Because of all that, I actually prefer no layering at all. Reuters articles are Layer 1 compressed and I find them annoyingly curt.
- jolmg 7y agoIsn't that called skimming, as in "I skimmed the text"? I was also thinking about how useful chdaniel's layers would be when it's more practical to just skim.
- keenmaster 7y agoMaybe, but I never did this before I tripled my reading volume while attending grad school. I thought skimming entailed some degree of horizontal scanning and actively reading clusters of words. In contrast, I don't even read clusters of 2 words when I do this and I don't aim to comprehend the skipped passages. I just automatically detect that they're irrelevant with basically zero reading.
- jolmg 7y agoExperiences may vary, but I've always thought of skimming as something that could be done to various degrees. Some examples: 1. going through pages looking for interesting textual structure, for example dialog, numbers, capitalized words, etc. 2. scanning vertically or in a zig-zag fashion, using peripheral vision to look for interesting words 3. reading the first few words of a paragraph before deciding if it's interesting or not. I normally use 2, then try 3 on a paragraph that passes 2's test. Only when a paragraph passes test 2 and 3, do I decide to read it with my (temporary) full attention. 1's more for when I'm searching for something in particular or when what I'm reading follows a specific format and I'm interested in a particular section with distinctive structure.
- keenmaster 7y agoWow. That is next-level stuff. This makes me think of how varied the human experience is, even for the most routine activities. I've heard the word "skimming" hundreds or maybe thousands of times before, but clearly it is an inaccurate abstraction of the range of things someone can mean when they say "skimming." Here is a dictionary definition: "The action of reading something quickly so as to note only the important points." If you showed me that definition before I started skimming effectively, I would have never extrapolated the behavior you described from that word. I didn't even know people did that. -----------Idea ---------- I could see value in an open source "Verbose Dictionary" where people from all ages and walks of life would be able to add their own definition of a word. There would be two general rules when someone makes an entry: 1. They would need to write their definition in a verbose manner. I'm thinking at least three sentences, usually more, but also not as long as a Wikipedia entry. 2. They would need to be as open and honest as possible, so that there's minimal translation loss between what they're communicating and what we take away from it. Importantly, the word needs to be described with both intellectual and emotional cues. The author would also be able to let the reader know basic facts about themselves, and there would be some mitigations against trolling or fakers. Over time, we would converge on a more universal language to maximize our mutual understanding of what each of us truly feel and think about words, concepts, current events, people, etc.... There would also be optional tags and slider scales (i.e. 1-10) that can attach to each definition so that you can correctly communicate the breadth, depth, and magnitude of your thoughts and feelings on the word. Critically, the goal would not be to achieve groupthink and converge on the same definition. That would be contrary to the premise of the Verbose Dictionary. Not only would I find such a dictionary highly captivating, but I also think that it can serve as a useful tool for conceptual mapping or things like artificial neural networks. What are your thoughts? Would you use the Verbose Dictionary?
- cloud_surfer 7y agoNeat. This layered approach reminds me of the Youtube series where they explain concepts such as Quantum Physics at 5 different levels of difficulty (children, highschool/uni students, phds, field experts).
- chdaniel 7y agoI didn't know that exists — will look it up. Yep, similar concept... I believe we always learn on layers (when we actually learn).
- istorical 7y agoThis is how pretty much all writing online should work IMO, even if the 'deeper' version is just a citation or link to respected expert work. Some combo of this tool for writers and community-annotations a la Genius.
- chdaniel 7y agoTell me more about the a la Genius idea? I know, love and constantly use Genius. Here's how I see what I described earlier: https://invis.io/GQWINO2YKU2#/410298082_1_Min_Verison https://invis.io/GQWINO2YKU2#/410298082_1_Min_Verison What do you think?
- blauditore 7y agoFWIW, this is how news articles are classically structured. They are initially high-level, then dive more and more into detail as the article goes on.
- chdaniel 7y agoSure! Or how TLDRs work on Reddit. The problem with news and reddit's TLDR is... there's only layer 1 and layer max. What about the in-between? Here's how I see what I described earlier: https://invis.io/GQWINO2YKU2#/410298082_1_Min_Verison https://invis.io/GQWINO2YKU2#/410298082_1_Min_Verison What do you think?
- bhl 7y agoHave you seen axios.com? They used to start off with short paragraph bites of news articles, that had a one-click go deeper to an in-depth piece.
- chdaniel 7y agoI didn't but I just checked it out now. Interesting I'd say. They have the short-version and the max-version. The tool I'd like to make would allow you to do all the in-between versions
- blauditore 7y agoActually, I think news articles don't have clear-cut layers, but actually gradually dive deeper. The original motivation were layout considerations for printed newspapers with limited space. With all articles pre-written like that, an editor could arrange them on the final layout and cut off at the end at discretion while keeping the most relevant information given the remaining space. That being said, I don't think this is too relevant for your idea, just an interesting anecdote.
- omarhaneef 7y agoWhat you propose as the system for writing makes sense and probably reflects what many people already do. However, I am curious to know what the tool does. In other words, someone can write a “thesis statement”, and the bullet points and an outline and so on in any editor. What does the tool do?
- jkcorrea 7y agoFor what it's worth, a lot of good software doesn't actually "do" many new things, other than support a specific use case with a better UX than existed previously :)
- chdaniel 7y agoIt'll be a writing tool. A text editor. There are two ways to approach it: 1. Let people brain dump — write everything they've got on their mind. Click "new layer". Cut down on words. Click "new layer". Cut down on words. Repeat ad nauseam. Every time you write a new layer, you're "editing" your article so as to make it shorter. In other words, you're purifying the idea 2. Let people write the shortest version, then write a bit more, then more. I'm doing way #1 because I feel like road #2 prevents people from having a brain dump... I'd lose all my ideas if I'd start with the short verison
- Twisol 7y agoMy usual approach tends to interleave the two approaches. Brain dump, then distill, then reconstitute in a more crystalline form. Repeat as necessary.
- mncharity 7y agoMine as well. And the process is often lossy, so I'll keep old variants easily at hand. Eg, "this old variant had nice property X, or dealt with Y well, or suggests a direction worth exploring". Brainstorming, well, "everything is a graph", but perhaps picture versions as columns, with each column showing all three levels, with transclusional editing between them. So you do a pass in whichever direction, create a new column, and easily grab material from previous variants, and repeat.
- aglionby 7y agoThis sounds fantastic and is something I've broadly thought about for a little while. A little while back someone else linked a concept of what they had done with the idea -- initially a paragraph was visible, and some of the words had a coloured box around them which could be clicked to expand on that term, all the while maintaining a flowing prose. So, I think a slightly different goal to what you describe (it was technical writing I think?), but similar enough. Unfortunately I didn't save it and have previously (frustratingly) spent at least an hour looking for it to no avail, so I'm curious to see what you come up with!
- chdaniel 7y agoIf you ever find it again, send it my way please! Indeed it would be very useful for complex concepts explanations. Definitely not do tabloids or anything like that — though it might... help? It's essentially the reverse way of what writers do when they write the "tweet version" of their essay — plus all the steps in-between. @ your last sentence: Check out the InVision link I've added to the OP!
- yan 7y agoI believe what you’re looking for is: https://www.telescopictext.org/ https://www.telescopictext.org/ (demo is at .com)
- davidmckenna 7y agoSounds really cool and reminds me of Jason Fried's writing class idea[1]. I think many people still view Twitter's brevity as stifling nuance instead of forcing users to really refine their ideas. [1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-writing-class-id-like-to-teach/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-writing-class-id-like-to-teac...
- chdaniel 7y agoWow. I love JF and, obviously, this idea as it's pretty much on the same basis. I'd love to send it to him as soon as it's done — if anyone can help me with this, I'd be more than grateful Indeed, there are problems with Twitter, people take stuff out of context and like to be polarized. But just as you say, the first time I interacted with Twitter I loved the fact that I had to "distill" my idea. Kinda like Vodka — you keep distilling alcohol until you purify it (or close to it). What you're saying about "refining the idea" made me think about this.
- StavrosK 7y agoI wrote something similar for HTML: https://skorokithakis.github.io/expounder/ https://skorokithakis.github.io/expounder/
- mncharity 7y agoFun. Quick user experience report: expanded "atoms"; the effort to find the boundaries of the insert was a thing ("where does it start? ah, next sentence.", "oh, I read this bit already, so I'm past the end"); with an unmoved mouse, I tried clicking "atoms" again to toggle the insert away (didn't). Perhaps color the insert?
- StavrosK 7y agoThanks for the feedback, there should be a fade-in when the text expands, and there's an option to click again to close, but IIRC it's not enabled on the demo. I think it's unnecessary, but it bothers some people to not be able to close them back up.
- Kungfuturtle 7y agoThis is a super neat tool—thank you for creating and sharing!
- StavrosK 7y agoThanks, I'm glad you like it!
- chdaniel 7y agoFantastic Stavros, I love it. Really close concepts we've got here. I thought of exactly what you've made a few weeks ago as... some words may or may not be jargon on a certain "layer" of my essay format. So what I barely-envisioned was what you put into code here. Will bookmark it!
- StavrosK 7y agoYep! I was thinking of your layers idea while making this, but I wanted something that would allow people to drill down in a more targeted way (rather than generally). You're right that it usually ends up being used to define terms, but you can also use it well for elaboration. I think the ideal solution will be some sort of middle ground, where much of the drilling down will be done by clicking on specific words or sentences, but a slider would allow you to generally expand more text in the article, for things that aren't exactly related to other sentences. It does take a bit of doing, and drilling down to another layer should also be able to delete text, so the wording flows better. If you want to talk about this more, feel free to send me an email, I find this problem very interesting.
- dcposch 7y agoThis is great! Two quick thoughts... - Maybe limit the layers to 2 or 3. The example you've got in Invision has eight layers which gives me decision paralysis. Do I want the "7 minute read" or the "9 minute read"? - Consider an onramp from Twitter. People have big audiences there, and linking out to Layered Ink might work better than those 50 tweet "tweet streams".
- chdaniel 7y agoThank you DCP! 1. Hmm, the concept is: the more layers, the better. This way, you can easily "pick your pace" — if you're short on time and you want easily-consumable content, you'd skim through 1-min versions. Ideally if at a certain point you say "holy shit, I love this", you'd jump to the full version. The same way you don't just skim your favourite author's new article — you just go to the full version because he's proven time and time again that his style fits you 2. Oh? Tell me more? Did I get you right: showing it to ppl who bypass the 280-char-limit by having tweet storms/threads? P.S: I love Dynasty's logo!!!
- crehn 7y agoRegarding (1), I think the parent still has a point. Too many choices can be stressful to the user. How do you expect users to interact or choose between "7 minute version" and "9 minute version"? Are they expected to keep going up the layers one-by-one until the full version is reached? Are they expected to intuitively know which one to pick right away? Too many possible choices also delegates the responsibility of picking the number of layers to the writer, which can be an additional stress. If possible, I'd try to figure out the most common use cases. The interactions and thought processes of users should be intuitive and dead simple to describe. Other than, loving the idea! Keep it up. :)
- chdaniel 7y agoValid point, thanks for pointing it out. I'll keep thinking about it — if you come up with a solution, please PM me!
- 7y ago
- jiofih 7y agoReminds of https://getcoleman.com/ https://getcoleman.com/ and this other portfolio site where each word could be expanded until it became a large essay, can’t remember its name.
- TooCleverByHalf 7y agoCan layer 0 be sources supporting the content?
- chdaniel 7y agoThe way I'm making the tool, yes, you could do that
- thegabriele 7y agoI had a similar idea for wikipedia. Example: a short, by words, explanation for a mathematical problem. Then, the possibility to expand to a more rigorous proof and so on. This would enforce a top/down type of writing that could benefits audience and creators. I believe it would easely apply to the great part of knowledge sharing. Neat implementation.
- micimize 7y agoI actually prototyped something similar a long time ago. It allowed for authoring sections that could be composed into a number of views. The only difference is that I wanted to capture the different "facets" of an article as well - so you could have a tab that was just the code, or statistics, etc. You could possibly prototype with a coda template: https://coda.io/@michael-joseph-rosenthal/essayist https://coda.io/@michael-joseph-rosenthal/essayist
- audiometry 7y ago“Oops! Something went wrong!” When trying to sign up.
- ChrisHardman29 7y agoI like this idea! I'm building something similar at www.sivv.io. This is a community for knowledge sharing where users share / discover summaries of useful knowledge, ideas or advice that are structured into sections (e.g. background, key point, examples) that can be hidden or revealed depending on the preferences of the reader. The idea is that this forces authors to remove any 'padding' and allows readers to consume the key points as quickly as possible, in theory learning more while reading less. We are currently focusing on the topics of business, behavioural science, personal development, professional development, science & technology and wellbeing. You can sign-up to the beta version at www.sivv.io - any feedback would be much appreciated!
- moriturius 7y agoWhen I read your description I immediately thought of the Minto Pyramid principle. Your tool is like a technical way of solving the same problem :)
- chdaniel 7y agoI've never heard of it but I looked it up for the last minutes and indeed, Layered Ink would be one of the ways to respect the pyramid principle! Thanks for pointing it out. Where have you heard about it?
- TouchyJoe 7y agoWorks for books? Tolkien too long a read.
- chdaniel 7y agoIt'd be an immense effort to do it for a book but it surely could work
- fgribreau 7y agoI've built something like this called "stretchtext" 3 years ago :) Here is the demo (use the slider displayed after the first blockquote in the article) https://blog.fgribreau.com/2014/05/fr-stretchtext-retour-sur-ma-premiere.html https://blog.fgribreau.com/2014/05/fr-stretchtext-retour-sur... or click on "[+]" to go deeper. The code is open-source here: https://github.com/FGRibreau/stretchtext https://github.com/FGRibreau/stretchtext
- gintery 7y agoThis would be really good for scientific articles. They are usually filled with (important but noisy) details that make skimming them for the important ideas difficult.