Re: intuitive writing

Happy New Year everyone, Moshe,

> Hello - I put down my thoughts on the subject of the present method of
> writing and its problems. I would be very happy if you would take
> the time to read it, and if it interests you enough and you have any
> suggestions or further ideas, to send them to me at
> moblid@yahoo.com. Even if it doesn’t interest you, but you know
> someone that it might - please send it on to him! Thank you.
I'm just responding to some of your points, Moshe. I'm not forwarding
the message to anybody because frankly I saw no revolutionary ideas.
It's a pity you didn't make footnotes.

...

> 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.
Solved by cultivating stronger reading skills using special
techniques and exercises. According to statistics an average reader
reads about 500-800 letters per minute memorizing 40-60% of the text.
After a simple training people start to read 1500-2500 signs per
minute (and some of them up to 10000 signs) memorizing 80-95% of the
text. Clearly, the text itself or the nature of it isn't a problem.

> A word doesn’t convey much information, much less than a picture for
> example. Yet the amount of time that it takes for the eye to process
> both isn’t very different.
The argument seems to be very weak. What do you call "a picture"?
A hieroglyph or a giant painting in a museum?

...

> I will start with the first, more technical, aspect of the problem.
> Letters and words in all the languages I know are very uniform. They
> are always the same color, on the same background; are of a similar
> shape, stay in one line, and are usually the same font and style.
These make reading much easier. Different shapes, fonts, line-heights
or font styles are bad taste and are disrespectful to the reader.

...

> Actually, present day writing is a remnant of a culture based on
> parchment and manuscripts.
This is like saying that human language is rudiment of the ancient
people. The main point is that people think in words. In order to read
you have to pronounce text. Only the very basic ideas can be expressed
in pictures that all the people will be able to understand.

...

> In the humanities and social sciences graphs and maps are used only
> to illustrate certain points, and are never the discussion itself,
> because graphs are number-oriented.
Exactly. Because the humanities are often contradictory and social
sciences are often contradictory. There's no agreement, as you say, on
what the axes are in the sciences themselves, let alone language.

...

> 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.
I agree with what J. "Mach" Wust said. You can't draw freedom, essence
or charisma. The deeper your thought is, the more likely you will
think in words, not in primitive pictures.

...

> But the present method of reading is step by step, in a linear
> fashion, not representing at all the way that the thought or idea
> itself is structured.
Good to hear you talking about the method of reading. Take a rapid
reading course. You don't have to read "in a linear fashion".

> One of the results of this is that there is a big difference between
> what the writer meant to say and what the reader reads (this may be
> very well in  a work of fiction, meant to be a work of art, but it
> won’t do at all in academic writing).
Depends on the writing skills of the authors. Translation is another
big topic.

...

> We can contrast the thinking represented by writing to the thinking
> that is represented in a map of any kind. When you look at a map,
> you first see the whole picture at once.
And you understand almost nothing, except "wow, it's a map". This is
true for a book page. You see the whole page and you understand
nothing.

> The eyes first go the main contours, the thick lines and the big
> letters. After that, you start looking in to the part of the map
> that interests you, going deeper and deeper into it.
Good writers are able to emphasize what is important. Various
typographical techniques exist to assist reading comprehension.

...

> Text, on the other hand, looks at a first glance like a block of
> black squiggly lines and at second glance it looks that way too.
If you can't read, that is true.

> The only way to get at the information is to read it, word by word.
> There are no intermediate levels, no dimensions.
No one orders you to read the whole book, word by word or even page by
page. Read what you need, search the book, use indices, table of
contents, references, etc. There are intermediate levels, there are
dimensions.

...

> This is also a technical problem (whether in talking to computers or
> to humans), but it is more than that - I can read two authors that
> say the same thing, and I won’t know it, because they said it in
> very different words.
Well, Moshe, take no offence, but this isn't a problem of the language
or the writers.

...

> Present methods don’t show you the logical steps inside the text.
Yes, they do. If people forget the previous paragraph when they come
to the next one, this isn't the fault of the text.

...

> 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.
Bad reading comprehension.

> The logical core is sometimes hidden from the reader by the other
> parts, leading him to evaluate wrongly the text he is
> reading.
Bad reading comprehension plus bad writing skills and bad editorial
work.

> Sometimes there is no logic at all behind the argument, or the logic
> is faulty, but since the logic is never stressed anyway, we aren’t
> expecting it to, and content ourselves with the fun of the
> reading.
Profane author with bad writing skills.

> Readers are persuaded much more by the artistry of the writing than
> by the ideas themselves,
Naive reader, weak reading experience.

> because the writing isn’t suited to show the ideas as they are, but
> rather the writers are usually showing how well they write.
Agreed. Not the writing alone, but our speech, the way we communicate.
Our *language*.

...

> The result of all this is that we are swimming an ocean of
> information, and aren’t able to find what we need.
I can understand your frustration. However, not only the volume of
information grows, but also the number of people who know more and
more. Add to that the numbers that various researches show: we use
from 1% to 10% of our brain power. Add to that the growing number of
memorizing methods.

> Academic writing has to be made self-indexing in some way, because
> no one else can contrive effective indexing other than the writer
> itself.
I join J. "Mach" Wust here. The keywords for you are: Semantic Web,
RDF, graphs, triplets.

> A further problem is that since the main language in academia is
> English,
The language of the international community on the whole.

> everybody has to learn it before they can become something.
This is a rather discriminating approach. Strongly disagreed.

...

> When we throw a ball, run, or talk, we are doing a very complex
> action, usually putting to use many different muscles in a very
> exact and complex way.
By no means. Some people have bad a coordination of movements. Some
are just bad at throwing balls.

> This is true in anything we do without thinking about it. Contrasted
> to these actions, things we do consciously and not out of intuition
> are very poorly done, and many times don’t work either.
I don't understand the point of this paragraph. What are you talking
of? The people on the whole are good at thinking, not throwing balls.
Speech (or language) means progress, not the balls.

...

> All big discoveries and ideas seem to be made mostly be the
> intuitional part of the brain, and less by the logical part.
Extremely proofless comment.

...

> I think that the answer lies in substituting the present text for a
> more complicated one. This text will not be a whole new language -
> it will use heavily the usual written language. But: 1. It will use
> many more marks, such as color, font, letter size, modes etc. If
> they will always signify the same idea, they shouldn’t be any more
> confusing than a topographical map after you know how to read it).
Number one reminds me of mathematical expressions. Unsuitable for the
humanities.

...

> 2. Instituting about a hundred (if possible, less) marks, that will
> represent words or ideas.
Maths plus various types of stenography.

...

> 3.  Place on the page - the idea is that someone looking at the page
> will understand immediately where the main argument is, where the
> auxiliary arguments are, in social sciences - theory as opposed to
> empirical data, implications and elaborations, sources and
> bibliography, etc.
Typographical techniques and writing skills (connective words,
parenthetical words, etc.).

> 4.  These techniques may be used to solve the indexing problem as
> well. The page placement, colors etc. will be used to show the
> importance of different parts of the idea. A computer will be able
> to read these codes, and so it will know the level of importance.
Sounds like Semantic Web again.

> 5.  A very important point is that all these symbols and signs will
> be the same for all writers, and so it will be much easier to
> compare and decide between different opinions.
Sounds like natural languages.

...

Alexander
--
  Alexander Savenkov                            http://www.xmlhack.ru/
  savenkov@xmlhack.ru             http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/