Re: intuitive writing

On Tue, 4 Jan 2005 07:52:07 -0500, Moshe Blidstein <moblid@...> wrote:

>Text is highly inefficient from the eye-brain aspect. We read (usually)
>much slower than we think. That is, our mind is idle most of the time we
>read, waiting for us to get to the end of the paragraph so that it can at
>last phrase the idea at hand to itself. This causes our mind to wander, and
>we get diverted from what we are reading while we wait for our eyes.
I think you're describing what happens when we read something written in a
bad style. A text written in a good style leads the reader directly from
point to point without any unnecessary diversion.


> A word
>doesn’t convey much information, much less than a picture for example.
This depends on the kind of information. Imagine a picture that says the
simple word "liberty".


>Writing is always in
>two dimensions, to suit paper, and because it works in lines it could
>actually be called one-dimensional.
Writing represents speech. Speech is essentially one-dimensional. It's
impossible to utter two words simultaneously.


>But if you try to conjure your deeper or more
>significant, or logical, thoughts, you will see that you usually state them
>to yourself in graphic form, and sometimes in no form at all. Profound
>ideas are many times just suddenly known, without a long tail of reasoning
>stretching out in back of them. Thinking is organic as opposed to linear -
>that is, we understand the whole idea at once and not point by point.
I believe that the main purpose of language is to give a form to what's in
your head so that it can be communicated. I believe that language is the
ideal tool for this purpose. Certain ideas may happen to be communicable in
another form than language.


>A different problem, that many artificial logical languages (such as
>lobjan) have tried to fix, is the indeterminacy of words, that is, there
>are many ways to say the same things and there are many words that mean a
>lot of things.
I believe that this is a consequence of the metaphorical essence of
language. But it's one side only of the money: I believe that it's the
metaphorical force of language that enables us to talk about things nobody
has ever faced before. If there were already an unambiguously fixed word for
every notion, we wouldn't be able to handle new situations.


>Present methods don’t show you the logical steps inside the text. The idea
>that is portrayed always has a certain hierarchy of meaning comprising it.
I don't think so. Who supports this idea? This may be true for certain text,
maybe those that strictly follow a logical structure, but I daresay that
most work in a different way. Language can express much more than logics can.


>In any argument, there is the logical core, the examples, assumptions,
>problem and criticism, etc. But all of these look in the text exactly the
>same, and actually the only way that a reader can know what is probably
>most important, or where the core of the matter is, is by the volume of
>writing - whatever the author says again and again is probably the most
>important.
Typography has developed many ways of highlighting what's most important:
Indexes, chapter headings, paragraphs, resumes, etc., and then there are
also proceedings like italic or bold text. It depends on the skills of the
writer and the typographer whether these tools are used in a convenient way.

What's more important is that speech itself has many ways of stressing
what's important. This depends also on the skills of the writer.


>Readers are
>persuaded much more by the artistry of the writing than by the ideas
>themselves, because the writing isn’t suited to show the ideas as they are,
>but rather the writers are usually showing how well they write. Writing
>should be an instrument of thought, not a way of obscuring it.
I believe that language (and consequently writing) is the form which thought
takes when it's communicated. Therefore, I believe we can't separate thought
from language/writing.


> In short, there should be a way of representing ideas in a much more true,
>exact, efficient, rational, multi-dimensional way. I want to accentuate
>that I am not referring to talking language, or to fiction or even some
>non-fiction writing, such as newspapers, fact-books, etc. I am referring
>mainly to more professional books which convey abstract ideas and put
>forward arguments that are supposed to be logical.
Why haven't you said this at the beginning of your post! Looks as if you'd
hide it in order to support your point! (Just kidding! ;-)


>Contrasted to these actions, things we do consciously and not out
>of intuition are very poorly done, and many times don’t work either. The
>short amount of evolutionary time that our conscious and logical part of
>the brain had didn’t serve it too well, as opposed to the many millions of
>years that our intuitions and instincts had. We’re very new at using this
>part of the brain, and don’t do it so well.
What a precious idea! Do you know who said it in the first place?


>The humanities and social sciences seem to be in a near stand-still as
>compared to the exact sciences. We know much more, but it doesn’t seem as
>if we understand much more than 30 years ago. This may seem like a short
>period to be talking about, but other sciences have gotten so far in this
>amount of time!
It's because they are new ciences or ciences that were possible because of
new instruments of research. I guess that ciences like Maths that also use
mainly the methods of thinking and writing have made similar progresses like
the philological ciences.




>I was reminded of an alleged syndrome that has come up in the last few
>years, called the power-point syndrome. As a result of using power-point
>slide shows to organize and discuss their ideas, corporate workers have
>become more stupid (or so they say), because they have to show all their
>thoughts in short points and in flowcharts. They can’t think more elaborate
>or complicated thoughts, just point by point ideas. This may be true, but
>doesn’t have much to do with the thoughts detailed above. I think that you
>can show very elaborate ideas in these techniques.
I've also read this recently in the media. I don't think, however, that the
cientific "techniques" you're proposing would be suitable for corporate
meetings, since corporate meetings are not cience.

Your proposals are very similar to the ideas of the proponents of the
Semantic Web:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web


gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust