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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
by yodon 5y 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/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.
- Apocryphon 5y agoFound this account recently emphasizing how bonkers military PowerPoint slides can be https://twitter.com/DefenseCharts https://twitter.com/DefenseCharts
- Infernal 5y agoThanks, I hate it
- whalesalad 5y agoMy dad was at the Skunk Works and then at Northrop Grumman. I’ve seen wicked PowerPoint slides that animate like a Pixar film. Poor guy was so engrained in the way that he used to send me screenshots via .ppt file (print screen, paste).
- tomcat27 5y agoLiterally every scientific paper has sections and subsections. Aka Lists.
- jacobolus 5y agoThe 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=0002QF https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
- Dylan16807 5y agoHas. Not "is entirely".
- pengaru 5y 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).
- gowld 5y agoFrom 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.
- arminiusreturns 5y agoSo much of my career's low points have been due to this engineers unable to convey information to management for various reasons issue. When you add too many layers of managment it becomes a Sisyphean task almost. If anyone has any tips we all could probably use them.
- kingkawn 5y agoBad presentations are eternal
- loloquwowndueo 5y agoHarvard Graphics Forever
- sedatk 5y agoWhat 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 5y agoThis 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.
- MrVandemar 5y agoNot just proof read it, but read every word out loud. You'll pick up mistakes, awkward sentence structure, poor word choices that you never would by reading it silently. Reading alound means you don't skim.
- makapuf 5y agoYes for superficial structure, I might skip things reading silently. However I struggle to think about the meaning of what I read when I read aloud, different focuses maybe. So that's complimentary.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- codyb 5y agoPrecision 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 5y ago
- jimmaswell 5y agoIf 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.
- rdiddly 5y agoArguably 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYuGNpOk5U
- yodon 5y agoThe 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).
- EnKopVand 5y 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. I’ve been involved in hiring several people and this has never been the case. So I’m curious as to where you got those 8 seconds. Hell, it usually takes the damn HR onboarding systems more than 8 seconds to load each page.
- kqr 5y agoThere 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 5y agoHmm. 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.
- edmundsauto 5y agoOrder matters, and will create bias or cognitive prioritization, regardless of whether something is a bullet point. Take the famous Napoleanic map - top left Carrie’s similar weight as the first bullet item. It may not be linear (1d) since it’s 2D, but the same problems exist: the first items we are exposed to will create a stronger reaction due to an artifact of arrangement rather than importance.
- skybrian 5y agoA 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 5y agoThat'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 5y agoThe 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 5y agoWhat does worrying have to do with writing structures? To further improve the title: "The advantages of list structure on most writings".
- themadturk 5y agoI 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_ 5y agoIn 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.
- afarrell 5y agoHowever, 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 5y agoThat 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.
- afarrell 5y agoI agree that this is likely not appropriate to a context where you've got lives and millions of dollars on the line. That's not my point. My points are that: 1. The audience for the article is not program managers at NASA but instead random people thinking about how to learn to write. 2. If someone is starting their learning journey then it is unhelpful to catastrophize the consequences of imperfect effort.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]