Friday, August 7, 2026

What Am I Looking At? "The modern formatting addiction in writing"

From the Dynomight Internet Newsletter, March 26:

EXHIBIT A

Here is some text. It is made out of words.

Here is a subsection

And here are some bullet-points:

  • Here is one.

  • Here is another.

Hierarchy

  1. Here is a numbered list.

  2. And now:

    • Look at this.

    • Bullets inside a number inside a section inside a section.

  3. What a time to be alive.

Pictures

The text can also contain pictures for you to look at with your eyes¹.

 

¹ There can also be footnotes; have an eye emoji: 👀

Quotes

The text can also include quotes.

  • Actually, let’s do one inside of a list.

    • A deeply nested list.

      • This is going to be awesome.

        > The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has his reasons.

      • Nailed it.

Back up

Wait a second.

  • Are we currently in a section or subsection or a subsubsection?

  • What parent section encloses this one?

  • Where are we in the hierarchy?

  • What are we doing?

EXHIBIT B

This is also text. It is also made out of words. But instead of jerky fragments, these words are organized into sentences, like normal human language.

Do you see how relaxing this is? After the torment you suffered above, isn’t it nice to have words that come in a simple linear order? And isn’t it nice that you just have to read the words, and not worry about how they fit into some convoluted implied knowledge taxonomy?

These sentences are themselves organized into paragraphs. The first sentence of each paragraph is a sort of summary. So if you want to skim, you can do that. But you don’t have to skim. This text also has italics and parentheses and whatnot. But not too much. (Just a little.)

Why I bring this up

Thanks for enduring that. My purpose was to illustrate a mystery. Namely, why do so many people today seem to write more like Exhibit A than Exhibit B?....

....MUCH MORE 

 Also at Dynomight:

Does every question mark deserve a Betteridge?

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