It doesn’t use bold. But it uses two other things – hyperlinks, and an interesting indentation scheme.
The hyperlinks often serve to remind you that This Concept Should Be Chunked, while also letting you zoom into that chunk if you want to.
The site begins:
No bullshit.
It doesn’t waste your time. Information is given minimally in bullet points.
Each skill has clear results, with detailed information that lets you evaluate your progress. Pretty soon, you’ll know it’s real.
No religious or mystical connotations.
Compare that to my OP, where I said:
It’s easier to skim, and build up a high level understanding of a post’s structure. If you understand a concept you can skip it and move on, if you want to drill down and understand it better you can do so.
Relatedly, it exposes your cruxes more readily. You can pick out and refute points, in a way that can be harder with meandering prose.
But I could instead have said:
It’s easier to skim and build a high level understanding of a post’s structure.
If you understand a concept you can skip it and move on. If you don’t, you can drill down into the details.
Bullet lists expose cruxes more readily. You can pick out and refute points, in a way that can be harder with meandering prose.
Which might accomplish the goal of “skim high level concepts”, without the thing Kaj discussed of “having trouble actually reading the subsequent words even if you want to.”
Another thing I notice is that there is a lot of symmetry between each level of indentation.
In particular, points at the same indentation level are usually of the same length, and often differ in length from the next level of indentation and the previous level. So you have the following:
---
The good.
You know more about yourself and your emotions.
This makes you able to handle emotions more skillfully, as well as stay true to your deep desires.
You have better access to subtle intuitions.
There’s much happening in your brain that you aren’t aware of, and sometimes all the answers you need are already in there somewhere.
You recognize more easily when other people are being honest.
When you get the hang of the skill of connecting to your deep emotions, it will also be easier to tell if other people are doing it or not.
The bad.
You have the reality of your mind rubbed in your face.
You won’t always like what you see.
Depending on your pre-existing assumptions, it might trigger a serious re-evaluation of your self-image and life philosophy.
You might be more easily frustrated with shallow conversations.
Discovering emotions together with other people is a very powerful and enriching experience. But it’s not always appropriate, and you can’t always do it.
---
Note that each level of indentation has its own style and length. The first one is two words, the second one is one short sentence, and the third one is a paragraph with either a long sentence with multiple clauses, or multiple sentences. I think this helps me a lot in parsing it.
On thing that comes to mind for me here is the ability to identify points (for refutation or otherwise) than is often the case with prose.
In a sense I read that as a statement about decomposing a written argument that is not laid out as some formal logical argument (p1, p2, p3, … qed). I’m not entirely sure that is the case but rather more about the writers skills.
So one thought is which allows someone to most clearly articulate their reasoning—at least for the case where an argument is actually being made?
I did like the idea that we do think in “bullets” and these thoughts are not initially logically ordered—that follows from the first and second round of thinking I suspect.
I general I do like both bulleted and enumerated lists but am not sure they are generally the best style for blog entries—in that a poorly presented listing is as confusing as rambling prose. I think they are great for getting points defined and possibly very good for posts seeking to start a discussion about how they relate or where they might collectively lead if the author is looking for that type of feedback.
I also find it interesting—and true for me—that bold in a bullet list context does prompt me to jump on rather than finishing the bullet where as in prose that does not occur.
Some things I notice on bewelltuned.com:
It doesn’t use bold. But it uses two other things – hyperlinks, and an interesting indentation scheme.
The hyperlinks often serve to remind you that This Concept Should Be Chunked, while also letting you zoom into that chunk if you want to.
The site begins:
No bullshit.
It doesn’t waste your time. Information is given minimally in bullet points.
Each skill has clear results, with detailed information that lets you evaluate your progress. Pretty soon, you’ll know it’s real.
No religious or mystical connotations.
Compare that to my OP, where I said:
It’s easier to skim, and build up a high level understanding of a post’s structure. If you understand a concept you can skip it and move on, if you want to drill down and understand it better you can do so.
Relatedly, it exposes your cruxes more readily. You can pick out and refute points, in a way that can be harder with meandering prose.
But I could instead have said:
It’s easier to skim and build a high level understanding of a post’s structure.
If you understand a concept you can skip it and move on. If you don’t, you can drill down into the details.
Bullet lists expose cruxes more readily. You can pick out and refute points, in a way that can be harder with meandering prose.
Which might accomplish the goal of “skim high level concepts”, without the thing Kaj discussed of “having trouble actually reading the subsequent words even if you want to.”
Another thing I notice is that there is a lot of symmetry between each level of indentation.
In particular, points at the same indentation level are usually of the same length, and often differ in length from the next level of indentation and the previous level. So you have the following:
---
The good.
You know more about yourself and your emotions.
This makes you able to handle emotions more skillfully, as well as stay true to your deep desires.
You have better access to subtle intuitions.
There’s much happening in your brain that you aren’t aware of, and sometimes all the answers you need are already in there somewhere.
You recognize more easily when other people are being honest.
When you get the hang of the skill of connecting to your deep emotions, it will also be easier to tell if other people are doing it or not.
The bad.
You have the reality of your mind rubbed in your face.
You won’t always like what you see.
Depending on your pre-existing assumptions, it might trigger a serious re-evaluation of your self-image and life philosophy.
You might be more easily frustrated with shallow conversations.
Discovering emotions together with other people is a very powerful and enriching experience. But it’s not always appropriate, and you can’t always do it.
---
Note that each level of indentation has its own style and length. The first one is two words, the second one is one short sentence, and the third one is a paragraph with either a long sentence with multiple clauses, or multiple sentences. I think this helps me a lot in parsing it.
Yeah, agreed.
On thing that comes to mind for me here is the ability to identify points (for refutation or otherwise) than is often the case with prose.
In a sense I read that as a statement about decomposing a written argument that is not laid out as some formal logical argument (p1, p2, p3, … qed). I’m not entirely sure that is the case but rather more about the writers skills.
So one thought is which allows someone to most clearly articulate their reasoning—at least for the case where an argument is actually being made?
I did like the idea that we do think in “bullets” and these thoughts are not initially logically ordered—that follows from the first and second round of thinking I suspect.
I general I do like both bulleted and enumerated lists but am not sure they are generally the best style for blog entries—in that a poorly presented listing is as confusing as rambling prose. I think they are great for getting points defined and possibly very good for posts seeking to start a discussion about how they relate or where they might collectively lead if the author is looking for that type of feedback.
I also find it interesting—and true for me—that bold in a bullet list context does prompt me to jump on rather than finishing the bullet where as in prose that does not occur.
(the above is harder to parse than usual because you can’t currently do bullets within blockquotes in the Rich Text Editor)